覆盖

历史思维和其他非自然行为

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

规划教授过去的未来

CHARTING THE FUTURE OF TEACHING THE PAST

 

 

 

 

萨姆·温伯格

Sam Wineburg

 

 

费城坦普尔大学出版社

Temple University Press

PHILADELPHIA

历史思维和其他非自然行为:规划过去教学的未来 / Sam Wineburg。

Historical thinking and other unnatural acts : charting the future of teaching the past / Sam Wineburg.

p. cm.—(对过去的批判性视角)

p. cm.—(Critical perspectives on the past)

包含参考文献。

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-56639-855-X(精装:碱性纸)—ISBN 1-56639-856-8(平装:碱性纸)

ISBN 1-56639-855-X (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 1-56639-856-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

电子书ISBN:978-1-43990-301-8

e-ISBN: 978-1-43990-301-8

1.历史——研究与教学——哲学。2 .美国——历史——研究与教学。3 .史学。4 .文化冲突——美国。I .标题。II .系列。

1. History—Study and teaching—Philosophy. 2. United States—History—Study and teaching. 3. Historiography. 4. Culture conflict—United States. I. Title. II. Series.

内容

Contents

引言:理解历史理解

Introduction: Understanding Historical Understanding

第一部分:

为什么要学习历史?

Part I

WHY STUDY HISTORY?

1.历史思维和其他非自然行为

1. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

2.历史教学与学习心理学

2. The Psychology of Teaching and Learning History

第二部分

学生面临的挑战

Part II

CHALLENGES FOR THE STUDENT

3.论历史文本的阅读:关于学校与学院之间鸿沟的思考

3. On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy

4.解读亚伯拉罕·林肯:情境化思维的案例研究

4. Reading Abraham Lincoln: A Case Study in Contextualized Thinking

5.描绘过去

5. Picturing the Past

第三部分

教师面临的挑战

Part III

CHALLENGES FOR THE TEACHER

6.从不同视角审视历史:学科视角在历史教学中的作用

6. Peering at History Through Different Lenses: The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in Teaching History

7.历史教学中的智慧模式

7. Models of Wisdom in the Teaching of History

8.时空错位:运用表现性评价了解历史教师的知识水平

8. Wrinkles in Time and Place: Using Performance Assessments to Understand the Knowledge of History Teachers

第四部分

历史作为国家记忆

Part IV

HISTORY AS NATIONAL MEMORY

9.文字的迷失:历史课堂中的道德模糊性

9. Lost in Words: Moral Ambiguity in the History Classroom

10.在新千年里理解(历史)意义

10. Making (Historical) Sense in the New Millennium

介绍

Introduction

理解历史理解

Understanding Historical Understanding

确定以下声明的来源:

Identify the source of the following statement:

对于美国历史上最简单、最显而易见的事实,100 分中只得 33 分,这绝对不是任何一所高中可以引以为豪的成绩。

Surely a grade of 33 in 100 on the simplest and most obvious facts of American history is not a record in which any high school can take pride.

以上对高中生历史知识的描述来源于:

The above characterization of high school student' historical knowledge comes from:

(a)拉维奇和芬恩在 1987 年全国教育进步评估报告中指出,学生的考试成绩使他们“面临因无知而严重受阻的风险,尤其是在进入成年、成为公民和为人父母之后”。

(a) Ravitch and Finn's report on the 1987 National Assessment of Educational Progress, in which they argued that student's test scores place them “at risk of being gravely handicapped by…ignorance upon entry into adulthood, citizenship, and parenthood.”

(b)1976 年《纽约时报》对美国青年进行的测试,标题为“《纽约时报》测试表明美国历史知识有限”。

(b) The 1976 New York Times test of American youth, published under the banner “Times Test Shows Knowledge of American History Limited.”

(c)1942 年《纽约时报》历史考试的报道促使艾伦·内文斯写道,高中生“对美国历史太无知了”。

(c) Reports on the 1942 New York Times history exam that prompted Allan Nevins to write that high school students are “all too ignorant of American history.”

(d)以上皆非。

(d) None of the above.

正确答案是 (d),以上皆非。¹这段引文既非出自 1987 年的全国评估,也非出自任何更早的报告。要找到它的出处,我们必须追溯到 1917 年,远在电视、社会研究游说团体、“思维技能”教学、家庭解体、互联网发展,以及我们用来解释低考试分数的任何其他因素出现之前。然而,结论是1917年, J·卡尔顿·贝尔和戴维·麦科勒姆对668名德克萨斯州高中生进行了测试,并将研究结果发表在当时刚刚起步的《教育心理学杂志》上。他们的研究结果与后来的评论者并无太大差异。考虑到1917年高中生的构成与如今几乎全民入学的情况截然不同,学生历史知识匮乏的现状令人震惊。世界发生了翻天覆地的变化,但有一件事却始终未变:孩子们对历史一无所知。

The correct answer is (d), none of the above.1 This quotation comes neither from the 1987 National Assessment nor from any of the earlier reports. To find its source we have to go back to 1917, long before television, the social studies lobby, the teaching of “thinking skills,” the breakup of the family, the growth of the Internet, or any of the other factors we use to explain low test scores. Yet the conclusions of J. Carleton Bell and David McCollum, who in 1917 tested 668 Texas high school students and published their findings in the fledging Journal of Educational Psychology, differ little from those of subsequent commentators. Considering the vast differences between those who attended high school in 1917 and the near-universal enrollments of today, the stability of student's ignorance is amazing. The whole world has turned on its head, but one thing has stayed the same: Kids don't know history.

传统的说法就是这样。这种说法根基并不牢固。或许我们花了太多时间去发现(然后又一遍遍地重新发现……)学生们不知道的东西,以至于忽略了关于年轻人历史知识的更有价值的问题。例如,学生们对过去了解多少?除了老师和教科书之外,还有哪些资源帮助他们理解历史?他们如何解读复杂的历史文献?他们如何区分在家中学到的历史观念和在学校接触到的历史观念?他们如何将自己的个人经历置于国家和世界历史的背景下?

Or so the conventional story goes. But it is a story that rests on shaky foundations.2 It may be that we have spent so much time discovering (only to rediscover over and over and over…) what students don't know that we have neglected more useful questions about young people's historical knowledge. For example, what do students know about the past? What sources beyond teachers and textbooks contribute to their understanding? How do they make meaning from complex historical documents? How do they navigate between images of the past learned in the home and those encountered in school? How do they situate their own personal histories in the context of national and world history?

这些问题鲜有人问津。从贝尔和麦科勒姆1917年的调查到最新的全国性评估,人们试图了解儿童历史知识的努力一直遵循着一条老套的模式。成年人聚在一起,决定孩子们应该掌握哪些知识。然后,他们进行测试。当结果显示学生表现不佳时,他们很少会去探究孩子们当时的想法,或者他们是如何理解眼前的任务的。儿童思维的思考,就像昆虫学家观察蚂蚁一样:蚂蚁(或孩子)被视为一个不仅体型更小,而且远逊于我们的物种。我们从外部观察它,测量它,并给它贴上一个标签。而且,在谈到年轻人时,我们很快就忘记了,从“学生知道我们希望他们知道的东西”到“他们什么都不知道”之间,存在着巨大的认知鸿沟。

These questions have rarely been asked. From Bell and McCollum's 1917 survey to the latest national assessments, efforts to understand children's historical knowledge have followed a well-beaten path. Adults come together to determine what facts kids should know. They administer a test. When results come back showing that students did poorly, they seldom ask what youngsters might have been thinking or how students might have interpreted the task before them. Deliberations about children's minds resemble those of an entomologist peering at an ant: the ant (or child) is viewed as a species not only smaller but vastly inferior to ourselves.3 We look at it from the outside, measure it, and assign it a number. And, with reference to young people, we quickly forget the leap of faith between the statement that students don't know what we want them to know and the conclusion that they don't know anything at all.

与其试图理解学生的历史知识,不如给它贴标签,这种策略导致了关于教学法的枯燥讨论。一种常见的解释是,如果教师教授的是内容而非“技能”,学生就能掌握更多历史知识。对于像亚瑟·贝斯特(Arthur Bestor,1953年著)或肖恩·威伦茨(Sean Wilentz,1996年著)这样的评论家来说,他们眼中的“社会研究游说集团”是最大的敌人(人们不禁会想,1917年德克萨斯州的幕后究竟是什么样的游说集团在运作?贝斯特和威伦茨都没有提及这一点)。(顺便提一下)。4讨论的其他方面集中在如何对美国历史课程进行分期或如何为课程中的主题安排合适的顺序。1987年的布拉德利委员会指出,就教学法而言,多样性是学习的调味品,并鼓励教师从多种教学方法和技巧中进行选择。但是,熟练的历史教学并非仅仅是选择合适的教学方法组合,正如历史诠释并非仅仅是选择合适的文献组合一样。所有这些讨论的共同点在于,对学习者以及学习者为教学带来的东西缺乏清晰的认识。诚然,正如迈克尔·舒德森所说,历史知识“渗透到文化的毛孔中”,即使这种知识“并非十七岁的青少年在回答测验时就能轻易提取出来”。大规模的测试或许能告诉我们一些关于年轻人知识水平的信息,但如果认为它们构成了历史知识的全部,那就阻碍了对美国知识生活和文化的任何严肃研究。5

The strategy of labeling, rather than trying to understand, student's historical knowledge has led to arid discussions of pedagogy. Students would know more history, according to one common explanation, if teachers taught content rather than “skills.” For commentators like Arthur Bestor, writing in 1953, or Sean Wilentz, writing in 1996, the bogeyman is the “social studies lobby” (one wonders what kind of lobby worked Texas backrooms in 1917, something neither Bestor nor Wilentz happened to mention).4 Other aspects of the discussion focus on how to periodize the U.S. history course or assign the proper sequence to topics in the curriculum. The 1987 Bradley Commission noted that, with respect to pedagogy, variety is the spice of learning, and it encouraged teachers to select from a mix of teaching methods and techniques. But skilled history teaching is no more a matter of selecting the right mix of methods than historical interpretation is a matter of selecting the right mix of documents. The common factor in all these discussions is a blurry image of the learner and what that learner brings to instruction. To be sure, historical knowledge, as Michael Schudson put it, “seeps into the cultural pores” even if such knowledge is not “readily retrievable by seventeen-year-olds answering a quiz.” Large-scale tests may tell us something about what young people know, but to assume that they constitute the alpha and omega of historical knowledge thwarts any serious investigation of American intellectual life and culture.5

在耸人听闻的标题和忧心忡忡的争论背后,隐藏着一个更根本的问题:历史教学对民主社会有何贡献?或者,正如我的同事盖亚·莱因哈特所说,历史对社会素养有何贡献?如果我们从课程中删除历史,我们会失去哪些思考、写作和质疑的方式?

Beyond the lurid headlines and hand-wringing lies a more basic question: What does the teaching of history contribute to a democratic society? Or, as my colleague Gaea Leinhardt puts it, What does history contribute to social literacy? What ways of thinking, writing, and questioning would be lost if we eliminated history from the curriculum?

这当然不是一个新问题。伍德罗·威尔逊曾指出,历史赋予我们“一种我们称之为判断力的宝贵思维能力”,每当美国历史学会委托开展本科历史专业现状研究时,类似的观点都会得到回应。⁶然而,历史作为一种改变我们思维方式的工具,一种培养我们辨别力、判断力和谨慎意识而非仅仅记住人名和日期的能力,在公共领域并未得到应有的重视。

This is not a new question, of course. Woodrow Wilson addressed it when he claimed that history endows us with the “invaluable mental power we call judgment,” and similar sentiments echo whenever the American Historical Association commissions a study on the state of the undergraduate major.6 But the role of history as a tool for changing how we think, for promoting a literacy not of names and dates but of discernment, judgment, and caution, does not receive prime billing in the public sphere.

本书中的文章都基于一个基本假设:历史教会我们如何做出选择、平衡各种观点、讲述故事,并在必要时对我们讲述的故事感到不安。这种历史观与拉什·林博的版本截然不同:“历史很简单。你知道历史是什么吗?就是发生了什么。” 7

The essays in this book begin with the basic assumption that history teaches us a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when necessary—about the stories we tell. This history is worlds apart from Rush Limbaugh's version: “History is real simple. You know what history is? It's what happened.”7

林博的历史课对我的高中学习大有裨益。历史课的内容就是弄清楚考试会考哪些主题,以及如何揣摩弗朗西丝·T·佩里塔诺(佩里塔诺小姐)的心思,从而写出一篇优秀的作文。我在这套体系下如鱼得水。直到我在布朗大学一年级,上了雅各布·纽斯纳的宗教史课,我才开始担心自己作为历史系学生的能力。纽斯纳说:“这是一次不容错过的经历。”(非官方课程指南)他从头开始讲课,字面意义上的“从头开始”。他问学生关于《创世记》第一章的内容:“这段经文在什么?”大约一百名学生顿时坐立不安。一个个困惑的大一新生试图概括经文,但纽斯纳却一拳砸在讲台上:“是‘做’,而不是‘说’。这段经文在做什么?”

Limbaugh's history served me well in high school. History was figuring out what topics were on the test and how to psyche out Frances T. Peritano, Miss Peritano, in crafting an essay response. I flourished in this system. It wasn't until my freshman year at Brown University, in Jacob Neusner's history of religion course, that I began to worry about my ability as a history student. Neusner (“an experience not to be missed,” said the unofficial course guide) began the course at the beginning, literally. “What is the text doing,” he asked about Genesis 1, as a hundred students or so collectively quaked in their seats. One after another, baffled freshmen summarized the text, only to have Neusner strike his fist on the podium: ”Doing, not saying. What is the text doing?”

几年后,当我开始教初中和高中历史时,我意识到我也可以鼓励学生审视文本的“论战性”(纽斯纳给我留下了深刻印象的这个词)。但是,除了“再读一遍”(或者“慢读”、“读给同伴听”、“小组阅读”)这种行之有效的教学策略之外,我完全不明白为什么有些学生能够得出在我看来不言自明的解释,而有些学生却不能。

When I found myself teaching history to middle and high school students some years later, I realized that I too could exhort students to examine the “polemic” of the text (a term Neusner imprinted on my consciousness). But apart from the tried-and-true pedagogic strategy of “read it again” (or, alternatively, “read it slowly” or ”read it to your partner” or “read it in groups”), I had no clue why some students could, and others could not, arrive at interpretations that seemed to me self-evident.

关于教学的书籍鲜有启发。学习心理学教科书以及像麦基奇的《教学技巧8》这样的指导手册,大多关注“技巧”——何时在讲课中插入例子、如何进行小组活动,或者如何根据布鲁姆认知目标分类法的不同层次提问。但这些泛泛而谈的问题并非困扰我的原因。我想了解的是,历史文本对年轻人构成了哪些具体挑战,以及是什么阻碍了他们更批判性地阅读这些文本。

Books on teaching provided few clues. Textbooks on the psychology of learning, as well as how-to books like McKeachie's Teaching Tips8 were concerned mostly with “technique”—when to insert an example into a lecture, how to do group work, or how to ask questions at different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. But generic issues were not what irked me. I wanted to know about the specific challenges that historical texts posed to young people, and what prevented them from reading these texts more critically.

我进入研究生院时,正值心理学和教育领域“认知革命”兴起之际。行为主义统治了几十年,但在20世纪80年代初期,随着心理学家和教育家们意识到试图通过研究无意义音节来理解记忆,或者通过抽象逻辑问题来探究推理本质是徒劳的,行为主义的统治地位开始瓦解。我拥有宗教史的学士学位,而且从未上过任何心理学课程,因此在斯坦福大学的“教育心理学研究”博士项目中,我显得格格不入。但不知何故,我的申请最终落到了李·舒尔曼的办公桌上,他相信我能为这个项目带来的东西足以弥补我的不足。

My arrival at graduate school coincided with the ascendance of the “cognitive revolution” in psychology and education. Behaviorism's decades-old hegemony came crashing down during the early 1980s, as psychologists and educators realized the folly of trying to understand memory by examining nonsense syllables or plumbing the nature of reasoning by using abstract logic problems. Holding a bachelor's degree in the history of religion, and never having taken a psychology course in my life, I was a fish out of water in Stanford's Ph.D. program in “Psychological Studies in Education.” But somehow my application ended up on the desk of Lee Shulman, who wagered that what I brought to the program would outweigh what I lacked.

在我的第一个学期,我选修了一门象征着该领域正在酝酿的变革的课程。“认知科学与教育”这门课充满了关于物理系学生“朴素认识论”、导致数学系学生系统性地犯下可纠正错误的“错误规则”以及生物系学生拉马克主义和抗拒教学信念的新研究成果。这门课的要求是撰写一篇关于学校课程中某一学科的文献综述。当我告诉教授我将回顾历史学习方面的文献时,我遇到了一位……她冷淡地回应道:“不行,没有文献可供参考。先从阅读方面的文献入手吧。”

In my first semester, I took a course that symbolized the changes brewing in the field. “Cognitive Science and Education” was filled with the new research on the “naive epistemologies” of physics students, the “mal-rules” that led math students into systematic and correctable errors, and the Lamarckian and instruction-resistant beliefs of biology students. The requirement for the course was a literature review on one of the disciplines in the school curriculum. When I informed the professor that I would review the literature on history learning, I met a chilly response. “Can't,” she said matter-of-factly, “there's no literature to review. Start with the literature on reading.”

一如既往,我接下来的两周都在埋头苦读音素意识、整体语言教学法以及阅读障碍和其他残疾相关的问题。最沮丧的时候,我翻箱倒柜地寻找去年收起来的法学院申请材料。最后,我终于约到了导师。“不用看文献,”舒尔曼笑着说,丝毫没有被我绝望的表情所影响。“你自己开始写吧。”

Ever dutiful, I spent the next two weeks slogging through studies of phonemic awareness, whole language, and issues of dyslexia and other disabilities. In my darkest moments, I rummaged my drawers in search of the law school applications that I had packed away the year before. Finally, I made an appointment with my advisor. “No literature,” smiled Shulman, unmoved by my end-of-the-world expression. “You'll start one.”

本书中的文章正是我对这一挑战的回应。自从我初次接触认知科学以来,我便一直关注着“理解历史理解”这一问题,借用苏珊娜·威尔逊(Suzanne Wilson)的精辟表述。为了避免读者误以为我忽略了浩瀚的史学文献才发现了这个问题,我必须向他们保证,我从科林伍德(Collingwood)、赫克斯特(Hexter)、布洛赫(Bloch)、戈特沙尔克(Gottschalk)、伍德沃德(Woodward)、贝克尔(Becker)、贝林(Bailyn)、诺维克(Novick)、金兹堡(Ginzburg)等人的著作中获益匪浅。这些文献往往带有自传性质,是对作者作为研究者、讲师和教师的职业生涯的反思,其中蕴含着丰富的洞见。但总的来说,它们关注的是熟练的历史实践,着重于历史认知的终点或最终结果。作为一名历史认知研究者,我最感兴趣的是中间发生的事情:熟练的历史实践的阶段、错误的开始、不成熟的想法、以及从历史学家的专著和新手方法论书籍中删去的徒劳无功的探索。

The essays in this book represent my response to this challenge. Since my first acquaintance with the cognitive sciences, I have been concerned with the question of understanding historical understanding, to use Suzanne Wilson's apt expression. Lest I convey the impression that I discovered this question only by ignoring the vast historiographic literature on this topic, let me assure readers that I have benefited immeasurably from the likes of Collingwood, Hexter, Bloch, Gottschalk, Woodward, Becker, Bailyn, Novick, Ginzburg, and others. This body of literature, often autobiographical and self-reflective on the writer's career as researcher, lecturer, and teacher, contains bountiful insights. But, by and large, it trains its gaze on skilled historical practice, and focuses on the endpoints, the termini, of historical cognition. As a researcher into historical cognition, I am most interested in what goes on in the middle: the way stations of skilled historical practice, the false starts, the half-baked ideas, the wild goose chases that are edited out of historian's monographs, as well as their methods books for novices.

为了在历史认知被整理成公开呈现之前将其揭示出来,我不能依赖传统的研究方法。多项选择题只能告诉我们正确的选项被涂黑了,却无法揭示做出选择的思考过程。为了探寻历史的真谛,我曾多次走进数百间教室——有时长达数月——倾听、观察、记录,并与学生和教师交流。有时,为了更近距离地了解历史思维的演变过程,我会指导历史学家、学生、教师和家长如何清晰地表达自己的想法,并“朗读”我提供的资料。这种方法能够让我们“实时”地了解历史认知。

To reveal historical cognition before it gets tidied up for public presentation, I could not rely on the traditional arsenal of research techniques. Multiple choice tests tell us only that the correct bubble was blackened, but not what thinking processes led to the choice. In search of historical understanding, I have ventured into hundreds of classrooms—sometimes for months on end—listening, observing, recording, talking to students and teachers alike. At other times, to get a closer look at historical thinking as it unfolded, I have taught historians and students, teachers and parents to articulate their thoughts and “read aloud” the documents I gave them, a technique that provides access to historical cognition in “real time.”

我曾将历史学家们从他们熟悉的领域(他们擅长的研究方向)中抽离出来,研究历史认知是如何展开的,并评估当一位中世纪史学者被置于美国革命的文献研究领域时,历史训练的“附加价值”是什么。一位研究美国城市发展的专家面对林肯关于奴隶制的观点。由于缺乏相关专著知识,且仅凭浅薄的知识基础来解读这些文献,这些历史学家所面临的任务本质上与大学概论课上的本科生或高中生在大学预科考试中面对文献分析题时的任务并无二致。当一位撰写过三本明朝著作(且最后一次学习美国历史是在大学三年级)的人试图理解1775年4月19日发生在列克星顿绿地的事件时,他们的历史训练还剩下多少?认为历史学家比学生做得更好仅仅因为他们是历史学家,这不过是用归因代替了解释。历史学家在“历史阅读”时究竟在做什么?哪些具体的认知行为促成了精深的历史解读?

I have taken historians out of their natural habitat (their favored research specializations) to study how historical cognition unfolds and to assess the “value added” of historical training when a medievalist is thrown into the documentary literature of the American Revolution or a specialist in the growth of American cities confronts Lincoln's views on slavery. Deprived of their knowledge of the monographic literature and confronting these documents with a paltry knowledge base, these historians faced essentially the same task as undergraduates in survey courses or high school students staring down the Document-Based Question on an Advanced Placement exam. What remains of historical training when someone who has written three books on the Ming Dynasty (and last took a course in U.S. history as a college junior) tries to understand what happened on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775? To say that historians did better on this task than students because they are historians merely substitutes ascription for explanation. What is it, exactly, that historians do when they “read historically”? What concrete acts of cognition lead to sophisticated historical interpretations?

本书前两章概述了其主题。第一章以20世纪80年代末90年代初的“历史之战”为背景,当时,建立国家历史标准的运动将尘封已久的课程问题推上了各大报纸的评论版面。关于应该教授哪些历史的争论(不出所料地沿着政治路线展开)占据了主导地位,以至于更重要的问题——为什么要教授历史——被忽略了。本书基于我对学生、教师和历史学家的研究,探讨了后一个问题。第二章将我自己的研究项目置于背景之下,概述了更广泛的历史教学与学习研究领域。这项研究主要由心理学家开展,但越来越多的教师和历史学家也开始参与其中。

The first two chapters in this book provide an overview of its themes. The first is set in the context of the “History Wars” of the late 1980s and 1990s, when the movement to erect national history standards thrust dusty issues of the curriculum onto the op-ed pages of major newspapers. The debate over which history to teach so dominated the debate (falling out along predictable political lines) that the more important question of why teach history in the first place was lost. Relying on my research with students, teachers, and historians I take up the latter issue. Chapter 2 places my own research program in the background as I survey the broader field of research on teaching and learning history. This research has been conducted mostly by psychologists but is increasingly carried out by teachers and historians.

第二部分着重探讨初学者在学习历史时面临的挑战。第三章对比了高中生和专业历史学家的阅读材料,第四章则以两位即将成为教师的大学生为例进行案例研究。第五章着重分析了五年级和七年级的学生如何通过绘制清教徒、西部拓荒者和嬉皮士的图画来“描绘过去”。他们的回答表明,尽管课程干预旨在消除性别方面的传统观念,但这些观念依然根深蒂固。

Part II focuses on the challenges faced by novices in learning history. Chapter 3 compares the readings of high school students with those of professional historians, while Chapter 4 is a case study of two college students, both preparing to become teachers. Chapter 5 focuses on how fifth and seventh graders “pictured the past” by making drawings of Pilgrims, Western Settlers, and Hippies. Their responses show the resilience, in the face of curriculum interventions designed to overcome them, of traditional assumptions about gender.

第三部分探讨了历史教学。这三篇文章源于我在斯坦福大学参与李·舒尔曼教师评估项目的经历。每篇文章都是与苏珊娜·威尔逊合著的,在过去的十年里,她与我一样,对理解历史教学这一复杂的智力活动充满热情。

The chapters in Part III take up history teaching. These three essays grew out of my experience with Lee Shulman's Teacher Assessment Project at Stanford. Each was co-written with Suzanne Wilson, who has shared with me over the past decade a passionate drive to understand history teaching as a complex intellectual act.

第四部分最后两篇文章将历史教学与社会中的其他“记忆场所”联系起来,寻求更广泛的背景。第一篇文章的背景设定在课堂,但很明显,高中生会将根深蒂固的家庭观念带入课堂。最后一章描述了我尝试将研究对象扩展到课堂和学校之外,涵盖家庭、社区、教会以及更广泛社会的“文化历史课程”。

The final duet of essays in Part IV seeks a broader context for history instruction by considering it alongside other “memory sites” in society. While the setting for the first essay is the classroom, it is clear that high school students bring to their lessons deeply entrenched narratives from the home. The final chapter describes my attempt to reach beyond both the classroom and the school as research sites to embrace the home, the community, the church, and the “cultural history curriculum” of the larger society.

眼光敏锐的读者会发现本书收录的文章在风格、语气和体裁上各有不同。有些章节最初是为心理学家撰写的研究报告,有些是用于新教师培训的案例研究,还有一些是非正式谈话或学术研讨会的记录。我为更广泛的读者群体修改了其中一些文章;另一些则只做了少量润色。每章末尾的简短说明介绍了文章的创作缘起,并提供了指向近期相关作品的链接。

Discerning readers will detect differences in style, tone, and genre in the pieces assembled here. Some chapters began as research reports written for psychologists, others as case studies used in training new teachers, and others as informal talks or academic colloquia. I have reworked some of these essays for a wider audience; others have been only lightly retouched. A brief explanatory note at the end of each chapter describes its origin and provides pointers to more recent work.

多年来,我积累了丰富的学术经验。李·舒尔曼(Lee Shulman)的风格在关于教学的章节中显而易见,但他的影响却贯穿全书。苏珊娜·威尔逊(Suzanne Wilson)和彼得·塞克斯(Peter Seixas)阅读本书中的每一篇文章的次数多到他们自己都不愿回忆。华盛顿大学为我提供了良好的学术环境。我从历史系的同事们身上获益良多,尤其是汤姆·普雷斯利(Tom Pressly)和约翰·芬德利(John Findlay),他们对认知心理学家如何看待历史学习非常感兴趣,并邀请我加入他们的团队。在教育学院,我与帕姆·格罗斯曼(Pam Grossman)的友谊一直是我坚实的后盾。同样,黛比·克德曼(Debby Kerdeman)也是一位耐心友善的同事。苏珊·莫纳斯(Susan Monas)也阅读了每一篇文章,指出了我文笔的不足之处,并教会了我许多写作技巧,而她对此却浑然不知。在此,我衷心感谢他们所有人。

Over the years intellectual debts pile up. The hand of Lee Shulman is easily discerned in the chapters on teaching, but his hidden hand is present throughout. Suzanne Wilson and Peter Seixas read every essay that appears here more times than either would like to remember. The University of Washington has provided a supportive environment in which to do this work. I have learned much from my colleagues in the history department, in particular Tom Pressly and John Findlay, both of whom were sufficiently intrigued by what a cognitive psychologist might say about learning history that they invited me into their midst. In the College of Education, my friendship with Pam Grossman has been a rock of support. Likewise, Debby Kerdeman has been a patient friend and colleague. Susan Monas has read every one of these essays as well, showing me where my prose faltered and teaching me more about writing than she will ever realize. I thank them all.

1991年,我在美国历史学会的《视角》(Perspectives)期刊上发表了部分研究成果的摘要后,收到了罗伊·罗森茨威格(Roy Rosenzweig)的一封主动来信,他鼓励我继续研究。正是罗伊的督促最终促成了本书的出版。如果没有他的鼓励以及坦普尔大学珍妮特·弗朗森德斯(Janet Francendese)的帮助,这本书就不会问世。

In 1991, after publishing a summary of some of this research in the American Historical Association's Perspectives, I received an unsolicited note from Roy Rosenzweig cheering me on. It was Roy's prodding that eventually led to this volume. Without his encouragement and that of Janet Francendese at Temple, this book would not exist.

从我攻读博士学位期间的助教工作开始,到博士前和博士后研究,再到“历史意义建构”项目(见第十章)的资助,我的研究工作一直得到斯宾塞基金会的慷慨支持。基金会前任主席帕特里夏·阿尔比约格·格雷厄姆对这项工作尤为关注,并相信这种“非传统”的研究方向最终会取得成果。对于斯宾塞基金会的持续支持,我深表感激。

Beginning with my Ph.D. assistantship, continuing through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and extending to grant support for the Historical Sense-Making project (see Chapter 10), my work has been generously supported by the Spencer Foundation. Patricia Albjerg Graham, past president of the foundation, took a special interest in this work and gambled that this “unconventional” line of inquiry would ultimately bear fruit. For the ongoing support of the Spencer Foundation, I am very grateful.

笔记

NOTES

1.参见 Diane Ravitch 和 Chester Finn, Jr.,《我们的 17 岁青少年知道什么?关于第一次全国历史和文学评估的报告》(纽约,1987 年),第 201 页;《纽约时报》,1976 年 5 月 2 日;Allan Nevins,“美国人的美国历史”,《纽约时报杂志》(1942 年 5 月 3 日),第 6、28-29 页;J. Carleton Bell 和 David F. McCollum,“美国历史学生成绩研究”,《教育心理学杂志》 8(1917 年),第 257-274 页。

1. See Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York, 1987), 201; New York Times, May 2, 1976; Allan Nevins, “American History for Americans” New York Times Magazine (May 3, 1942), 6, 28–29; J. Carleton Bell and David F. McCollum, “A Study of the Attainments of Pupils in United States History.” Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917), 257–74.

2.心理测量学家戴尔·惠廷顿(Dale Whittington)对基于大规模测试结果的历史知识贬值论断提出了质疑。参见她的文章“17岁青少年过去知道什么?”,载于美国教育研究杂志》 28(1991),759-80页。

2. The psychometrican Dale Whittington has challenged claims of depreciation in historical knowledge based on results of large-scale tests. See her “What Have 17-Year-Olds Known in the Past?” American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991), 759–80.

3.这个类比是戴维·奥尔森提出的。参见戴维·R·奥尔森和南希·托伦斯合著的《教育与发展手册》马萨诸塞州剑桥,1996 年)中的引言。

3. The analogy is David Olson's. See his introduction in David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, Handbook of Education and Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

4. Arthur Bestor,《教育荒漠:公立学校学习的退步》厄巴纳,1953 年);Sean Wilentz,“过去不是一个过程”,《纽约时报》,1996 年 4 月 20 日。Wilentz预测,“当今学生的历史文盲问题在未来一代只会更加严重”,但他没有提及 1917 年、1942 年或 1987 年类似的悲观预测。

4. Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Public Schools (Urbana, 1953); Sean Wilentz, “The Past Is Not a Process” New York Times, April 20, 1996. Wilentz predicted that the “historical illiteracy of today's student will only worsen in the generation to come” without reference to similar baleful predictions from 1917, 1942, or 1987.

5.关于这一点,请参阅迈克尔·舒德森的《美国记忆中的水门事件:我们如何记住、忘记和重建过去》(纽约,1992 年),第 64 页。

5. On this point, see Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York, 1992), 64.

6.参见第1章和3

6. See Chapters 1 and 3.

7. Rush Limbaugh III,1994 年 10 月 4 日,引自 Gary Nash、Charlotte Crab - tree 和 Ross Dunn,《历史受审:文化战争与历史的教学》(纽约,1997 年),第 6 页。

7. Rush Limbaugh III, October 4, 1994, cited in Gary Nash, Charlotte Crab-tree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997), 6.

8. Wilbert James McKeachie, 《McKeachie 的教学技巧:大学教师的策略、研究和理论》(波士顿,1999 年)。

8. Wilbert James McKeachie, McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers (Boston, 1999).

I

为什么要学习历史?

WHY STUDY HISTORY?

1

1

历史思维和其他非自然行为

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

在两者之间做出选择似乎荒谬至极,但这正是关于国家历史标准的辩论最终演变成的局面。乔治·华盛顿还是巴特·辛普森?”参议员斯莱德·戈顿(华盛顿州共和党)在1995年国会就此议题进行辩论时问道:哪个人物更能代表“我们国家历史中更重要的部分,值得我们的孩子学习?” ¹在戈顿看来,拟议的国家标准是对美国文明的正面攻击,是“意识形态驱动的反西方政治正确漫画式纪念碑”。²参议院显然也认同这一观点,以99票赞成、1反对否决了这些标准。

The choice between the two seemed absurd but this was exactly what the debate about national history standards had become. “George Washington or Bart Simpson,” asked Senator Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) during the 1995 Congressional debates on this subject: Which figure represents a “more important part of our Nation's history for our children to study?”1 To Gorton, the proposed national standards represented a frontal attack on American civilization, an “ideologically driven anti-Western monument to politically correct caricature.”2 The Senate, in apparent agreement, rejected the standards 99–1.

该标准的制定者们并没有就此罢休。主要负责整理众多小组和委员会报告的加里·纳什、夏洛特·克拉布特里和罗斯·邓恩发表了一份长达318页的反驳报告,其中驳斥了戈顿、他的主要支持者、时任国家人文基金会主席琳恩·切尼以及他们的各种保守派盟友——其中许多人是专栏作家和电台脱口秀主持人。纳什和他的同事承认,戈顿的说法没错,即没有任何标准明确指出乔治·华盛顿是第一任总统。但这仅仅是一个技术性问题。该标准要求学生“研究华盛顿总统任期内这个年轻国家面临的重大问题”,而且还有更多相关材料。在幼儿园至四年级的教学标准中,华盛顿被誉为“美国之父”。 3为了反驳切尼的说法,即像罗伯特·E·李或莱特兄弟这样的美国人因为不幸是已故的白人男性而被抹去,纳什及其同事统计了符合这些描述的人的名字——总共超过700人——并宣布这个数字“是所有被单独提及的女性、非裔美国人、拉丁裔和印第安人总数的数倍”。 4

The standard's architects did not take this rejection lying down. Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, the team largely responsible for collating the reports of many panels and committees, issued a 318-page rebuttal packed with refutations of Gorton, his chief sponsor, Lynne Cheney, then chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and their various conservative allies—many of them op-ed columnists and radio talk show hosts. Gorton was right, Nash and his colleagues admitted, in claiming that no standard explicitly named George Washington as the first president. But this was a mere technicality. The standards asked students “to examine major issues confronting the young country during [Washington's] presidency,” and there was more material on Washington as the “father of our country” in the standards for grades K-4.3 To counter Cheney's claim that Americans such as Robert E. Lee or the Wright Brothers were expunged because they had the misfortune of being dead, white, and male, Nash and colleagues added up the names of people fitting this description—more than 700 in all—and announced that this was “many times the grand total of all women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Indians individually named.”4

在关于标准的辩论中,类似的针锋相对很快就成了惯例。但表面之下,这种互相指责的伎俩却露出了更丑陋的真面目:双方都觉得有必要把对方的动机污蔑得最卑劣。因此,在1996年共和党总统候选人鲍勃·多尔看来,这些国家标准是“比外敌还坏”的人的杰作。 5而在纳什的团队看来,这些拟议标准的批评者是出于对美国多元化的潜在恐惧,他们认为“涌入历史舞台的新面孔破坏了旧有历史版本的对称性和安全性”。 6 用酒吧里常见的俚语来说,制定这些标准的人是叛徒;反对这些标准的人是种族主义者。

Similar exercises in tit for tat quickly became standard in the debate over standards. But just below the surface, name counts took on an uglier face: Each side felt it necessary to impute to the other the basest of motives. So, to Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, the national standards were the handiwork of people “worse than external enemies.”5 To Nash's team, critics of the proposed standards were driven by latent fears over a diverse America in which the “new faces [that] crowd[ed] onto the stage of history ruin the symmetry and security of older versions of the past.”6 In the barroom terms befitting such a brawl, those who wrote the standards were traitors; those who opposed them, racists.

这场辩论的激烈争论为二元对立的思维提供了沃土。例如,由美国学者(American Scholar)期刊——美国大学优等生荣誉学会Phi Beta Kappa的官方刊物——组织的一次论坛,邀请了11位著名历史学家就“我们的孩子应该学习什么样的历史?”这一问题撰写一篇一千字的文章。孩子们应该学习“国家的爱国主义、英雄主义和理想”,还是“其领导人和统治阶级的不公正、失败和虚伪”?为了确保与会者理解,他们还被问及美国是“历史上最伟大的成功故事之一”,还是“一次又一次错失良机的故事”? 7所幸,理智最终占了上风。耶鲁大学的埃德蒙·摩根(Edmund Morgan)是《印花税危机》的作者,因此对宣传这一主题并不陌生。他指出,任何答案都必然“更像是口号,而非对历史的理性探讨”,并略带讽刺地补充道,他“不需要一千字来表达这一点”。8

The rancor of this debate was rich soil for dichotomous thinking. Take, for example, the forum organized by the journal American Scholar, the official publication of the national honorary society Phi Beta Kappa. American Scholar asked eleven prominent historians to write a thousand words in response to the question, “What history should our children learn?” Should children learn “the patriotism, heroism, and ideals of the nation” or “the injustices, defeats, and hypocrisies of its leaders and dominant classes”? In case panelists didn't get the point, they were also asked whether the United States represented “one of the great historical success stories” or “the story of one opportunity after another lost”?7 Fortunately, sanity prevailed. Yale's Edmund Morgan, author of the Stamp Act Crisis and thus no newcomer to the topic of propaganda, noted that any answer would necessarily “look more like slogans than any reasoned approach to history,” adding, wryly, that he didn't need “a thousand words to say it.”8

鉴于这场辩论的基调,有些人可能会疑惑,历史为何会被视为人文学科的一部分——人文学科本应教导我们摒弃口号、包容复杂性、珍视细微差别。在世纪之交,伍德罗·威尔逊和其他十人委员会成员指出,历史远不止于具体的故事和人名,它要达到其最高目标,需要……赋予我们“我们称之为判断力的宝贵心智能力”。9可悲的是,目前的争论过于关注“哪种历史”的问题,以至于我们忘记了一个更基本的问题:为什么要学习历史?

Given the tenor of the debate, some might wonder why history was ever considered a part of the humanities, one of those disciplines that are supposed to teach us to spurn sloganeering, tolerate complexity, and cherish nuance. Writing at the turn of the century, Woodrow Wilson and other members of the Committee of Ten noted that history went well beyond particular stories and names to achieve its highest aim by endowing us with “the invaluable mental power which we call judgment.”9 Sadly, the present debate has become so fixated on the question of “which history” that we have forgotten a more basic question: Why study history at all?

这个被忽视的问题的答案并非显而易见。美国人从未真正确信历史在课程体系中的地位。历史教育或许正处于一时的热点时期,但其根基并不深厚。许多州对历史学习仅设定了最低要求。师范院校为未来的教师开设数学、科学和文学教学课程,但我们很难在全国范围内找到超过寥寥几门专门教授历史的课程历史在国家政策辩论中占据了大量篇幅,但在最重要的地方——孩子们学习的学校和教师接受培训的大学——历史的地位却远非稳固。

The answer to this neglected question is hardly self-evident. Americans have never been fully convinced of history's place in the curriculum. History education may be riding a momentary crest of interest, but its roots do not run deep. Many states set minimal requirements for the study of history. Schools of education offer future teachers courses in the teaching of mathematics, the teaching of science, and the teaching of literature, but we would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of courses in the entire nation devoted to the teaching of history. History is getting a lot of airtime in national policy debates, but in the places that matter most—the schools where kids learn and the colleges where teachers are taught—history's status is anything but secure.

本章我的重点并非在于哪种历史更好——是胜利者的历史、失败者的历史,还是两者兼而有之的某种所罗门式的结合。相反,我暂时抛开当前的“历史之争”,思考另一个问题:历史的意义何在?为何要在学校教授历史?简而言之,我的观点是,历史蕴藏着一种潜力,尽管目前尚未完全发挥,但它能以其他学科难以企及的方式使我们更加人性化。我并不声称自己对此观点独树一帜。但每一代人都必须重新思考,为何研究历史如此重要,为何历史能够凝聚人心,而不是像我们最近所见的那样,将我们撕裂。

In this chapter my focus is not on which history is better—that of the victors, the vanquished, or some Solomonic combination of both. Rather, I take several steps back from the current History Wars to ponder another question: What is history good for? Why even teach it in schools? My claim in a nutshell is that history holds the potential, only partly realized, of humanizing us in ways offered by few other areas in the school curriculum. I make no claim of originality in arguing this point of view. But each generation must ask itself anew why studying the past is important, and remind itself why history can bring us together rather than—as we have seen most recently—tear us apart.

我的论点围绕着一种贯穿所有与历史接触的张力展开:熟悉与陌生之间的张力,以及与我们试图理解的人们之间亲近与疏离感之间的张力。这两种极端都无法充分展现历史的复杂性,而偏向任何一方都会模糊历史的棱角,最终只留下陈词滥调和漫画式的刻板印象。成熟的历史思考恰恰取决于我们驾驭历史崎岖不平的图景的能力,取决于我们穿越介于熟悉与疏离之间的崎岖地带的能力。

The argument I make pivots on a tension that underlies every encounter with the past: the tension between the familiar and the strange, between feelings of proximity and feelings of distance in relation to the people we seek to understand. Neither of these extremes does justice to history's complexity, and veering to one side or the other dulls history's jagged edges and leaves us with cliche and caricature. Achieving mature historical thought depends precisely on our ability to navigate the uneven landscape of history, to traverse the rugged terrain that lies between the poles of familiarity and distance from the past.

熟悉感的吸引力最为强大。熟悉的过去诱惑着我们,让我们相信可以在时间长河中找到自己的位置,并在当下巩固自我认同。通过将我们自己的故事与前人的经历联系起来,过去成为我们日常生活中有用的资源,一个取之不尽、用之不竭的素材库,等待着我们去塑造。或者说,为了满足我们当下的需求而改变。将自身置于特定的时间维度是人类的基本需求。事实上,如果不这样做,我们就无法理解地球上的生命。

The pole of familiarity pulls most strongly. The familiar past entices us with the promise that we can locate our own place in the stream of time and solidify our identity in the present. By tying our own stories to those who have come before us, the past becomes a useful resource in our everyday life, an endless storehouse of raw materials to be shaped or bent to meet our present needs. Situating ourselves in time is a basic human need. Indeed, it is impossible to conceptualize life on the planet without doing so.

但如果我们将过去视为可以利用的东西,视为无需中介或翻译就能与我们对话的事物,最终只会将其变成另一种可供即时消费的商品。我们抛弃或忽略了过去中大量与我们当下需求相悖或无法完美契合的部分。这种“可用”的过去固然具有某种魅力,但这魅力如同跳蚤市场,充斥着琳琅满目的俗艳小玩意和古董珍品。因为在进入过去之前,我们或多或少都知道自己想要什么,所以这段经历不太可能改变我们,也不太可能促使我们重新思考自我。过去在我们手中如同黏土。我们无需拓展理解力去从过去汲取教训,而是扭曲过去,使其符合我们预先设定的意义。

But in viewing the past as usable, something that speaks to us without intermediary or translation, we end up turning it into yet another commodity for instant consumption. We discard or just ignore vast regions of the past that either contradict our current needs or fail to align tidily with them. The usable past retains a certain fascination, but it is the fascination of the flea market, with its endless array of gaudy trinkets and antique baubles. Because we more or less know what we are looking for before we enter this past, our encounter is unlikely to change us or cause us to rethink who we are. The past becomes clay in our hands. We are not called upon to stretch our understanding to learn from the past. Instead, we contort the past to fit the predetermined meanings we have already assigned it.

这种张力的另一极,即过去的陌生性,蕴含着惊喜和惊奇的可能性,让我们有机会邂逅那些促使我们重新思考自身作为人类概念的人、地点和时代。与过去的相遇,在最好的意义上,可以拓展我们的思维。然而,如果走向极端,这种方法也会带来自身的问题。脱离当下环境、关注点和需求的“独立”过去,往往会滋生一种深奥的异域风情,而这恰恰是人们在浏览定义当代历史实践的专著文献后所感受到的。这些专业文献或许能吸引一小群专业人士的关注,但却无法引起其他人的兴趣。 10

The other pole in this tension, the strangeness of the past, offers the possibility of surprise and amazement, of encountering people, places, and times that spur us to reconsider how we conceptualize ourselves as human beings. An encounter with this past can be mind-expanding in the best sense of the term. Yet, taken to extremes, this approach carries its own problems. The past “on its own terms” detached from the circumstances, concerns, and needs of the present, too often results in a kind of esoteric exoticism, precisely the impression one comes to after a tour through the monographic literature that defines contemporary historical practice. Much of this specialized literature may engage the attention of a small coterie of professionals, but it fails to engage the interest of anyone else.10

熟悉的过去与我们当下的需求息息相关,而陌生的过去则难以捉摸,其适用性并非显而易见,两者之间存在着一种难以回避的张力。这种张力的存在是因为历史的这两个方面都至关重要且不可分割。一方面,我们需要与我们所研究的人物建立联系,因为这正是激发我们兴趣并让我们产生共鸣的关键所在。我们逐渐将自己视为某种传统的继承者,这种传统为我们提供了立足之地和安全感,以抵御现代世界的瞬息万变。

There is no easy way around the tension between the familiar past, which seems so relevant to our present needs, and the strange and inaccessible past, whose applicability is not immediately manifest. The tension exists because both aspects of history are essential and irreducible. On the one hand, we need to feel kinship with the people we study, for this is exactly what engages our interest and makes us feel connected. We come to see ourselves as inheritors of a tradition that provides mooring and security against the transience of the modern world.

但这只是故事的一半。要充分发挥历史的人性化特质,要借助历史的力量——用卡尔·德格勒的话来说,就是“拓展我们对人性的理解和认知” ¹¹——我们需要面对遥远的过去,一个并非那么遥远的过去。过去与我们之间的关联,与其说体现在思维模式和社会组织方式上,不如说体现在时间维度上。正是这段过去——起初它让我们感到困惑,甚至感到厌倦——才是我们最需要的,因为它能帮助我们理解,我们每个人都远不止于出生时被贴上的那几个标签。持续地与这段不太熟悉的过去接触,能让我们认识到自身在地球上短暂旅程的局限性,并使我们能够真正融入整个人类大家庭。矛盾的是,过去的意义或许恰恰在于它最初在我们看来无关紧要之处。

But this is only half the story. To realize history's humanizing qualities fully, to draw on history's ability to, in the words of Carl Degler, “expand our conception and understanding of what it means to be human,”11 we need to encounter the distant past—a past less distant from us in time than in its modes of thought and social organization. It is this past, one that initially leaves us befuddled or, worse, just plain bored, that we need most if we are to achieve the understanding that each of us is more than the handful of labels ascribed to us at birth. The sustained encounter with this less-familiar past teaches us the limitations of our brief sojourn on the planet and allows us to take membership in the entire human race. Paradoxically, the relevance of the past may lie precisely in what strikes us as its initial irrelevance.

我研究这些问题的方式并非历史学家——那种花费大量时间查阅文献来重构过去的人,而是心理学家——那种设计任务和访谈来揭示我们如何认识自我的人。同样,我的数据并非来自档案馆,而是源于我与各行各业的人们——教师、历史学家、高中生和家长——的访谈。在接下来的三个案例中,我将展现这项研究的几个片段。第一个案例是一位高中生接触美国独立战争时期原始文献的经历;第二个案例是一位小学校长在阅读了一位十九世纪初助产士的日记后的反应;第三个案例是一位历史学家接触到揭示亚伯拉罕·林肯种族观的文献的经历。

I approach these issues not as a historian, someone who spends time using documents to reconstruct the past, but as a psychologist, someone who designs tasks and interviews that shed light on how we come to know who we are. Similarly, my data are not found in archives but are created when I sit down to interview people from all walks of life—teachers, practicing historians, high school kids, and parents. In the following three vignettes, I offer glimpses from this program of research. The first comes from a high school student's encounter with primary documents from the Revolutionary War; the second, from an elementary school principal's reactions after reading the diary of a midwife from the turn of the nineteenth century; and the third, from a historian's encounter with documents that shed light on Abraham Lincoln's views on race.

在这些短文中,我试图表明,历史思维在其最深层次上既非自然而然的过程,也非心理发展自然而然的产物。我认为,历史思维的形成实际上与我们通常的思维方式背道而驰,这也是为什么记忆人名、日期和故事远比改变我们用来理解过去意义的基本思维结构容易得多的原因之一。在一个迪士尼和MTV主导一切的世界里,我们获得成熟的历史理解的可能性微乎其微。但正是过去被赋予的用途,才使得这些其他目标显得更加重要。

In these vignettes, I try to show that historical thinking, in its deepest forms, is neither a natural process nor something that springs automatically from psychological development. Its achievement, I argue, actually goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think, one of the reasons why it is much easier to learn names, dates, and stories than it is to change the basic mental structures we use to grasp the meaning of the past. The odds of achieving mature historical understanding are stacked against us in a world in which Disney and MTV call the shots. But it is precisely the uses to which the past is put that endow these other aims with even greater importance.

无法逾越的卢比孔河

THE UNBRIDGEABLE RUBICON

让我先从德里克说起,他是一位十七岁的大学预科历史系学生(后来成为他所在高年级的第二名毕业生代表),曾参与过我最早的研究项目之一。我对德里克印象很深,因为正是在与他合作的过程中,我才首次思考起我在这里要探讨的这些问题。12

Let me begin with Derek, a seventeen-year-old Advanced Placement history student (and later the salutatorian of his senior class), who participated in one of my earliest studies. I remember Derek clearly because it was in working with him that the questions I take up here first came into view.12

德里克参与了一项研究,该研究要求高中生(以及专业历史学家)阅读一系列关于列克星顿战役的原始资料。德里克读到,英军在列克星顿绿地遭遇了阻挡他们的民兵。他注意到交战双方人数悬殊——根据文献记载,大约数百名英军正规军对抗七十名左右的殖民地民兵。他注意到,战斗结束后,八名殖民地民兵阵亡,而英军方面只有一人伤亡。这让他觉得,这场战斗可能比“战役”一词所暗示的更加一边倒。这些敏锐的观察体现了德里克的卓越才智,使他在同龄人中脱颖而出。然而,当被要求选择一幅最能反映他所阅读的文字资料的图片时,德里克并没有选择那幅展现殖民地民兵溃不成军的图片,尽管根据他之前的观察,那才是合乎逻辑的选择。相反,他选择了一幅描绘殖民者躲在墙后,重新装填火枪,瞄准英军的画作。德里克认为这幅画最准确,因为

Derek participated in a study in which high school students (as well as professional historians) read a series of primary sources about the Battle of Lexington. Derek read that British forces encountered the minutemen standing in their way on Lexington Green. He remarked on the unequal numbers of the combatants—something on the order of hundreds of British regulars opposed seventy or so colonists, according to the documents. He noted that when the encounter was over, eight colonists lay dead, while there was only one casualty on the British side. This suggested to him that the engagement might have been more one-sided than the term “battle” suggests. These were astute observations that reflected Derek's keen intelligence and made him stand out among his peers. However, when asked to select the picture that best reflected the written evidence he had reviewed, Derek did not choose the one that showed the colonists in disarray, which would have been the logical choice given his earlier observations. Instead, he chose the picture that showed the colonists hiding behind walls, reloading their muskets, and taking aim at the Redcoats. Derek believed that this depiction was the most accurate because

这给了(民兵们)某种程度上的……有利位置,他们占据了一座小山,我猜这边应该还有一堵墙……民兵们肯定会慌乱起来,躲在杆子后面什么的,而不是待在这里正面迎击(英军)……你知道,这里肯定有个小山,他们肯定在想着要躲在什么东西后面,找个地势低洼、不易被射杀的地方,随时准备杀敌。如果他们像图中(描绘民兵们狼狈不堪的场景)那样站着,等着被射杀,那他们的想法就太荒谬了。13

it gives [the minutemen] sort of…an advantageous position, where they are sort of on a hill and I presume somewhere over here is a wall I guess…. The minutemen are going to be all scrambled, going to be hiding behind the poles and everything, rather than staying out here facing [the British]…. You know there's got to be like a hill, and they're thinking they got to hide behind something, get at a place where they can't be shot besides being on low ground, and being ready to kill. Their mentalities would be ludicrous if they were going to stand, like, here in [the depiction showing the minutemen in disarray], ready to be shot.13

如果按照我们对学生在历史课堂上应该做什么的传统定义来评判,德里克的阅读堪称典范。正如布拉德利委员会(该委员会的报告开启了当前历史教育改革运动)所言,学生应该“进入一个充满戏剧性的世界——暂时放下对结局的了解,以便感受另一个时代——一种同理心,使学生能够透过亲历者的视角来看待事物。” 14德里克不仅试图透过他人的视角来看待事物,他还试图重构他们的世界观,他们的“心态然而,德里克的重构只有在这些人认同他自己对战场礼仪的现代观念时才成立:即面对更强大的敌人,应该躲在城墙后进行游击战。德里克的阅读提出了一个引人注目的讽刺德里克对这一事件的看法似乎受到一系列关于正常人行为方式的假设的制约。反过来,这些假设又掩盖了他在审阅书面证词时所做的观察。具有讽刺意味的是,德里克眼中的自然之举,在清教徒初次接触这种战斗形式时,却被视为野蛮行径。到了十六世纪,欧洲战争已经演变成一种高度复杂的绅士礼仪:交战双方白天作战,晚上共进晚餐,这并非罕见。战场上的交战遵循着一套繁复的礼仪,部分原因是由于发射和重新装填一支滑膛枪涉及一系列繁琐的步骤——多达四十二个独立的步骤。 15

Judged by conventional definitions of what we want kids to do in history classrooms, Derek's reading is exemplary. In the words of the Bradley Commission, the report that launched the current reform movement in history education, students should enter “into a world of drama—suspending [their] knowledge of the ending in order to gain a sense of another era—a sense of empathy that allows the student to see through the eyes of the people who were there.”14 Derek has not only tried to see through other's eyes; he has attempted a reconstruction of their world views, their “mentalités.” However, Derek's reconstruction holds true only if these people shared his own modern notions of battlefield propriety: the idea that in the face of a stronger adversary, you flee behind walls and wage guerrilla warfare. Derek's reading poses a striking irony. What seemed to guide his view of this event is a set of assumptions about how normal people behave. These assumptions, in turn, overshadowed his very own observations, made during the review of the written testimony. Ironically, what Derek perceived as natural was perceived as beastly by the Puritans when they first encountered this form of combat. By the sixteenth century, European warfare had evolved into a highly complex form of gentlemanly encounter: It was not unheard of for combatants to wage war during the day and dine together at night. Battlefield engagements conformed to an elaborate etiquette, in part the result of the cumbersome sequence of actions—up to forty-two separate steps—involved in firing and reloading a musket.15

大规模战争文化与清教徒在新英格兰沿海地区遇到的土著居民的习俗发生了冲突。例如,在佩科特人中,象征性行为盛行,是一种军事文化。他们通常不会与土著居民正面交锋,造成大规模流血冲突,而是通过小规模袭击,以索取象征性的贡品来解决世仇。这种传统的冲突导致了毁灭性的对抗,例如1637年清教徒包围了神秘河畔的整个印第安村庄,并将其夷为平地。所罗门·斯托达德在1703年写给约瑟夫·达德利的信中解释道:

The culture of large-scale warfare clashed with the mores of the indigenous peoples the Puritans encountered along the New England coast. Among the Pequots, for example, a military culture of symbolic acts prevailed. The norm was not face-to-face encounters with massive bloodshed, but small-scale raids that settled feuds by exacting symbolic tribute. This clash in traditions led to ruinous confrontations, as when the Puritans encircled the entire Indian village at the Mystic River in 1637 and burned it to the ground. Solomon Stoddard, writing to Joseph Dudley in 1703, explained:

如果印第安人像其他人一样,并且像其他国家一样公平地进行战争,那么以违背基督教习俗的方式追捕他们或许会被视为不人道……但他们应该被视为窃贼和杀人犯……他们不会公开出现在战场上挑衅我们,而是残忍地对待落入他们手中的人……他们的行为如同狼群,因此也应该像对待狼群一样对待他们。16

If the Indians were as other people are, and did manage their warr fairly after the manner of other nations, it might be looked upon as inhumane to persue them in a manner contrary to Christian practice…. But they are to be looked upon as thieves and murderers…they don't appeare openly in the field to bid us battle, they use those cruelly that fall into their hands…. They act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves.16

德里克并非漫不经心的读者。恰恰相反,他阅读流畅,而且他监控自身认知(心理学家称之为“元认知”)的能力令人艳羡。然而,最终,这些十八世纪的文献并没有让德里克感到任何触动。殖民者的行为并没有让他驻足沉思,感叹道:“哇,这群人真奇怪。究竟是什么让他们如此行事?”这样的反应或许会促使他去思考那些与他自身世界格格不入的行为准则——责任、荣誉、为理想献身。这些文献并没有激发德里克提出新的问题,也没有让他去思考人类经验的新维度。相反,他既有的信念塑造了他所接触到的信息,使得新信息符合他已知的框架。德里克阅读了这些文献,却几乎没有从中获益。

It is not that Derek was a careless reader. On the contrary, his reading was fluent, and his skill at monitoring his own cognition (what psychologists call “metacognition”) was enviable. But when all was said and done, Derek's encounter with these eighteenth-century documents left him unfazed. The colonist's behavior did not cause him to stand back and say, “Wow, what a strange group of people. What on earth would make them act this way?” Such a reaction might lead him to contemplate codes of behavior—duty, honor, dying for a cause—foreign to his world. These documents did not spur Derek to ask himself new questions or consider new dimensions of human experience. Instead, his existing beliefs shaped the information he encountered so that the new conformed to the shape of the already known. Derek read these documents but he learned little from them.

德里克的解读提出了一些关乎历史理解核心的问题。鉴于我们对信念根深蒂固的本质的了解,我们究竟该如何将已知置于既有框架之外,从而理解过去人们的思维方式?这绝非易事。认为我们可以摆脱已知,阻止阅读某些词语时引发的“激活扩散”的想法,不禁令人想起艾伦·梅吉尔的诠释学天真论,或者说对“完美感知”的迷信。 17 在哲学家中,汉斯-格奥尔格·伽达默尔对这一立场所蕴含的问题阐述得最为透彻。伽达默尔问道,既然正是这些既定的思维模式才使得理解成为可能,我们又该如何克服它们呢? 18我们自身,与我们研究的对象一样,都是历史的产物。试图抛弃我们已知的知识去窥探“真实”的过去,就像试图用肉眼观察微生物一样:我们舍弃的工具恰恰是让我们能够看到的东西。

Derek's reading raises questions that lie at the heart of historical understanding. Given what we know about the entrenched nature of beliefs, how, exactly, do we bracket what we know in order to understand the thinking of people in the past? This is no easy task. The notion that we can strip ourselves of what we know, that we can stop the “spread of activation” set off when we read certain words, recalls Allan Megill's notion of hermeneutic naivete, or the belief in “immaculate perception.”17 Among philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer has been the most instructive about the problems this position entails. How can we overcome established modes of thought, Gadamer asks, when it is these modes that permit understanding in the first place?18 We, no less than the people we study, are historical beings. Trying to shed what we know in order to glimpse the “real” past is like trying to examine microbes with the naked eye: The instruments we abandon are the ones that enable us to see.

这种观点与罗宾·科林伍德等人的经典历史主义立场截然不同。科林伍德认为,“一切历史都是思想史”,历史学家能够设身处地地站在尤利乌斯·凯撒的角度思考,“设想……凯撒所处的境地,并思考凯撒对当时局势的看法以及可能的应对之道。” 19 科林伍德相信,我们能够以某种方式“了解凯撒”,因为人类的思维方式在某种深刻而本质的层面上超越了时间和空间。

This position differs considerably from the classic historicist stance one finds in Robin Collingwood and others. For Collingwood, “all history is the history of thought” the ability of the historian to put him- or herself in Julius Caesar's mind, “envisioning…the situation in which Caesar stood, and thinking for himself what Caesar thought about the situation and the possible ways of dealing with it.”19 Collingwood believed that we can somehow “know Caesar” because human ways of thought, in some deep and essential way, transcend time and space.

当代历史学家却不这么认为。不妨看看意大利著名历史学家、畅销书《奶酪与蛆虫》的作者卡洛·金兹堡的话:

Not so fast, say contemporary historians. Consider the words of Carlo Ginzburg, the eminent Italian historian and author of the best-selling The Cheese and the Worms:

历史学家的任务恰恰与我们大多数人从小被灌输的观念相反。他必须打破我们与过去人们之间虚假的亲近感,因为他们来自与我们截然不同的社会。我们越了解这些人的精神世界,就越应该对我们与他们之间的文化鸿沟感到震惊。20

The historian's task is just the opposite of what most of us were taught to believe. He must destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past because they come from societies very different from our own. The more we discover about these people's mental universes, the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them.20

或者引用获奖作品《猫科动物大屠杀》的作者罗伯特·达恩顿的话

Or these words from Robert Darnton, award-winning author of The Great Cat Massacre:

其他人就是其他人。他们的思维方式与我们不同。如果我们想理解他们的思维方式,就应该从捕捉“他者性”这一概念入手……我们需要不断地从对过去的虚假熟悉感中挣脱出来,需要不断地接受文化冲击。21

Other people are other. They do not think the way we do. And if we want to understand their way of thinking we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness…. We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of culture shock. 21

或者以下摘自西方历史学家理查德·怀特的话:

Or these from Richard White, historian of the West:

任何优秀的史学著作都始于陌生感。过去不应令人感到舒适。过去不应是当下的熟悉回响,因为如果熟悉,又何必重温呢?过去应该如此陌生,以至于你会疑惑,你以及你认识和爱的人,究竟是如何从那样的时代走出来的。22

Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present, for if it is familiar why revisit it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.22

为了理解我们与凯撒的差异,我们能否像他认识自己那样,或者像同时代的人认识他那样“了解”他?即便我们确信这种​​可能性,除了求助于巫术之外,我们又该如何确定自己已经成功了呢?换句话说,这些当代历史学家的观点似乎与前文引述的观点——即历史理解的目标应该是“透过亲历者的视角”——截然相反。如果金兹堡等人的观点正确,那么历史研究的目标应该是教会我们那些我们无法直接看到的事物,让我们认识到自身视野的固有局限性。

In coming to understand how we differ from Caesar, can we ever “know” him in the way he knew himself or in the way contemporaries knew him? Even if we were convinced of the possibility, how would we know we had succeeded, short of appealing to necromancy? In other words, the point made by these contemporary historians seems to be the opposite of the one cited earlier—that the goal of historical understanding should be to “see through the eyes of the people who were there.” If Ginzburg and others are right, the goal of historical study should be to teach us what we cannot see, to acquaint us with the congenital blurriness of our vision.

即使是“历史知识应作为思考当下问题的例证库”这一观点也受到了挑战。历史哲学家路易斯·O·明克认为,我们对过去了解得越多,就越应该谨慎地进行类比。在明克看来,历史知识可能会切断我们与过去的联系,使我们觉得自己与所研究的人物之间存在隔阂。例如,约翰·洛克由于其看似“现代”的政府观和人性动机观,不再被视为我们的同时代人。相反,我们意识到与洛克的这种隔阂,迫使我们调和两种相互矛盾的力量:一方面,我们在思想上与《政府论》下篇中的洛克保持着亲近感;另一方面,我们又与鲜为人知的反经验主义著作《论基督教的合理性》中的洛克产生了疏离感。通过研究符合我们既定印象的洛克以及与我们认知相悖的洛克,我们可以了解一个更加细致入微的洛克。洛克不再仅仅是我们自身观点的投射。明克写道:“新洛克的疏离和怪诞之处反而使他更易于理解;正是他那古怪的加尔文主义改变了我们对他所有观点的理解,尽管它也打破了我们在政治和哲学讨论中与洛克交流如同与同时代人交流的幻想。” 23换句话说,当我们思考埃及的绘画和透视表现时,我们不能再“假设埃及人像我们一样看待事物,却无法像我们一样绘画。” 24相反,我们必须考虑这样一种可能性:他们之所以以不同的方式绘画,是因为他们看待事物的方式不同,而这种看待事物的方式中蕴含着某种特质。无可挽回地迷失了。因此,无论我们如何努力,我们都永远无法完全跨越横亘在我们思想和凯撒思想之间的卢比孔河。

Even the notion that historical knowledge should serve as a bank of examples for contemplating present problems has come under challenge. The more we know about the past, claimed the philosopher of history Louis O. Mink, the more cautious we should be before drawing analogies to it. Historical knowledge in Mink's view can sever our connection to the past, making us see ourselves as discontinuous with the people we study. John Locke, for example, is no longer our contemporary by virtue of his seemingly “modern” understanding of government and human motivation. Instead, our awareness of discontinuity with Locke forces us to reconcile two contradictory forces: intellectual proximity with the Locke of the Second Treatise on Government and intellectual estrangement from the anti-empiricist Locke, author of the rarely read Essay on the Reasonableness of Christianity. In studying the Locke who fits our image as well as the Locke who complicates it, we can come to know a more nuanced personality. Locke becomes more than a projection of our own views. “The new Locke” writes Mink, “is accessible in his remoteness and strangeness; it is precisely his crotchety Calvinism which changes our understanding of all his views although it destroys the illusion that in political and philosophical discussion we are communing with Locke as with a contemporary.”23 Put differently, when we think about Egyptian drawing and representation of perspective, we can no longer “assume that the Egyptians saw as we see, but could not draw as we can.”24 Rather, we must consider the possibility that they drew differently because they saw differently, and that there is something about this way of seeing that is irretrievably lost. Much as we try, then, we can never fully cross the Rubicon that flows between our mind and Caesar's.

延续与变革

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

我们究竟有多愿意深入探讨这一点?在人类经验的洪流中,究竟何时上个月会变得陌生,去年会变得遥远?的确,如果将这种观点推向极端,认为过去与现在毫无连续性,其后果与认为过去直接反映现在一样严重。大卫·洛文塔尔提醒我们,过去是一个“异国”。25一个异国,而非一个遥远的星球。用僵化的断​​裂感取代天真的历史观,无异于玩弄思维上的抢椅子游戏,放弃一种还原论,却又接受另一种。

How willing are we to press this point? Exactly when in the flow of human experience does last month become strange, last year remote? Indeed, when pushed to its extreme, the consequence of thinking that there is no continuity with the past is as grave an error as thinking that the past directly mirrors the present. David Lowenthal reminds us that the past is a “foreign country.”25 A foreign country, not a foreign planet. To replace naive historicism with a rigid sense of disconnection is to play mental musical chairs, to give up one reductionism only to adopt another.

历史思维要求我们调和两种相互矛盾的立场:首先,我们既定的思维模式是一种无法摆脱的遗产;其次,如果我们不去尝试摆脱它们,我们就注定会陷入一种麻木的当下主义,将当下强加于过去之上。正是这种悖论吸引我去阅读劳雷尔·撒切尔·乌尔里希的《助产士的故事》 。这本书讲述了玛莎·巴拉德的故事,她是一位生活在1735年至1812年间的助产士。正如卡尔·德格勒在书评中所写,乌尔里希“揭示了一个既与我们如此不同,又与我们如此相似的社群的迷人生活。” 26

Historical thinking requires us to reconcile two contradictory positions: first, that our established modes of thinking are an inheritance that cannot be sloughed off, and, second, that if we make no attempt to slough them off, we are doomed to a mind-numbing presentism that reads the present onto the past. It was precisely this paradox that drew me to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, which narrates the story of Martha Ballard, a midwife who lived between 1735 and 1812. As Carl Degler wrote in his review of the book, Ulrich “unravels the fascinating life of a community that is so foreign, and yet so similar to our own.”26

大约在我读这本书的时候,明尼苏达州的一群教育工作者邀请我举办一个关于历史的研讨会,主题是“认识历史的方式”,即超越历史仅仅是人名和日期的罗列——在明尼苏达州推行“成果导向教育”的过程中,历史已经沦为历史的简单罗列。27这个为期两天的研讨会上,我选择将通过像乌尔里希的著作这样的书籍学习历史,与参与者最熟悉的学习方式——通过历史教科书学习历史——进行对比。

About the time I was reading this book, I was asked by a group of educators in Minnesota to develop a workshop on history as a “way of knowing” something beyond the compendia of names and dates that history had become in the course of that state's affair with “outcome-based education.”27 In the two days of this workshop, I chose to contrast learning history from books like Ulrich's with the approach most familiar to participants: learning history from history textbooks.

作为构建历史理解的工具,教科书提出了引人入胜的挑战,并带来了一系列自身特有的问题。教科书的核心在于罗兰·巴特所说的“指涉幻觉”,即认为事物被讲述的方式就是事物原本的样子。28为了实现这种幻觉,教科书利用了各种语言惯例。首先,教科书消除了“元话语”,也就是作者在文本中介入以表明立场和观点的部分。元话语在历史学家之间的交流中很常见,但在他们为中小学生编写的教科书中却被删去了。 29此外,文本的形成过程也被隐藏或抹去:教科书很少引用文献记录;即使出现原始资料,通常也以“侧边栏”的形式呈现,以免干扰正文。最后,这本教科书采用全知全能的第三人称叙述。读者看不到作者的身影;相反,作者以一种超然物外、高高在上的姿态发声。

As vehicles for creating historical understanding, textbooks present intriguing challenges and create a set of problems all their own. Textbooks pivot on what Roland Barthes called the “referential illusion” the notion that the way things are told is simply the way things were.28 To achieve this illusion, textbooks exploit various linguistic conventions. First, textbooks eliminate “metadiscourse” or the existence of places in the text where the author intrudes to indicate positionality and stance. Metadiscourse is common in the writing historians do for one another, but it is edited out of the writing they do for schoolchildren.29 In addition, traces of how the text came to be are hidden or erased: Textbooks rarely cite the documentary record; if primary material appears, it is typically set off in “sidebars” so as not to interfere with the main text. Finally, the textbook speaks in the omniscient third-person. No visible author confronts the reader; instead, a corporate author speaks from a position of transcendence, a position of knowing from on high.

在明尼苏达研讨会伊始,我给22位学员朗读了温斯罗普·乔丹的《美国人》一书的节选。这本书是美国历史教科书的常用教材,适用于11年级学生。 30乔丹在描述与巴拉德日记大致同一时期的殖民地经济时,重点关注了“三角贸易”,即殖民地、西印度群岛和非洲之间奴隶、甘蔗和朗姆酒交换的路线网络。故事以粗体标题“北方发展商业和城市——糖蜜和朗姆酒”为框架展开,女性仅在题为“家庭农场”的章节中出现。接下来两天,关于女性在经济生活中所扮演角色的段落成为了我们检验自身理解的试金石,也是我们在研讨会最后几个小时尝试重写的文本。

I began the Minnesota seminar by giving the twenty-two participants a selection from Winthrop Jordan's The Americans, a widely used U.S. history textbook for the eleventh grade.30 In describing the colonial economy during roughly the same period as Ballard's diary, Jordan focuses on “triangular trade” the nexus of routes involved in the exchange of slaves, sugar cane, and rum between the colonies, the West Indies, and Africa. The story is organized under the boldfaced heading “The North Develops Commerce and Cities—Molasses and Rumbullion” with women appearing in the story only in the section entitled “Family Farms.” The following paragraph about the role of women in economic life became, for the next two days, the touchstone against which we assayed our own developing understanding and the text that, in the final hours of the workshop, we attempted to rewrite.

凡是在家庭农场生活过的人都知道,这样的生活意味着每个人都要长时间辛勤劳作。孩子们从能学会剥豌豆、剥玉米皮或捡柴火起步起,就至少要做一些零工。妇女们则承担着永无止境的家务。她们用挂在敞开式壁炉上的金属锅做饭。她们在烟囱里挖出的空腔里烤东西,那空腔被当作烤箱。她们纺粗布,然后缝制成全家人的衣服。她们用自制的肥皂在木桶里洗衣服和被褥。31

Anyone who has ever lived on a family farm knows that such a life involves long hours and hard work for everyone. Children worked at least part time from the age when they could be shown how to shell peas, shuck corn, or fetch firewood. Women performed an unending round of tasks. They cooked in metal pots that were hung over the open fireplace. They baked in a hollow compartment in the chimney that served as an oven. They spun rough cloth and sewed it into clothing for the family. They washed clothes and bedding in wooden tubs with soap they made themselves.31

在仔细研读了这段文字及其上下文之后,我们转而阅读乌尔里希的著作。作为一本探索历史思维的文本,本书提供了多个切入点。每一章都以玛莎日记中的几页内容开篇,这些日记完整地保留了十八世纪的拼写和语法规范。乌尔里希在让读者了解她所研究的证据类型之后,才开始探讨玛莎生平中涌现出的主题和趋势。以下日记摘录代表了参与者所研究的材料类型:

After examining this passage and the surrounding narrative, we turned to Ulrich's book. As a text for exploring historical thinking, this work offers multiple points of entry. Each chapter starts with several pages from Martha's diary, with eighteenth-century spelling and grammatical conventions intact. Only after giving the reader a feeling for the kinds of evidence she reviewed does Ulrich go on to explore themes and trends that spring from Martha's life. The following diary excerpt is representative of the kinds of materials participants studied:

11月15日 6点 在帕克先生家。霍尔德曼太太在这里。

November 15 6 At Mr Parkers. Mrs Holdman here.

阴天,天气寒冷。霍尔德曼太太来这里做礼服。本杰明太太来裁剪斗篷。波莉·拉斯特下班后过来。下午我被叫去帕克先生家。巴拉德先生好些了……

Cloudy & Cold. Mrs Holdman here to have a gown made. Mrs Benjamin to have a Cloak Cut. Polly Rust after work. I was Calld to Mr Parkers aftern. Mr Ballard is better….

17岁,在ditoes和Poores先生家。47号生了个女儿。在Meloys船长家也下雨了。凌晨两点,我接到Parkers先生的电话,叫我去Poores先生家。佩奇医生在我到达之前就被叫来了。我取出了孩子,是个婴儿。他选择缝合腰部。我早上8点回到家。收到了6先令的报酬。巴拉德先生和埃弗姆去参加礼拜,多莉和萨莉下午去。查尔斯和约翰·科克斯在这里。晚上11点我被叫去梅洛伊斯船长那里。下雨了。波尔先生的女儿XX 32出生

 

17 F At ditoes & Mr Poores. Birth 47th a daughter. At Capt Meloys allso Rainy. I was called from Mr Parkers at 2 hour morn to Mr Poores. Doct Page was Calld before my arival. I Extracted the Child, a dagt. He Chose to Close the Loin. I returnd home at 8 hour morning. Receivd 6/ as a reward. Mr Ballard & Ephm attend worship, Dolly & Sally aftern. Charls and John Coks supt here. I was calld to Capt meloys at 11 hour Evening. Raind. Birth Mr Poores daughter X X32

 

这些摘录构成了我们调查的一部分。我们还查阅了乌尔里希根据玛莎的日记整理的分娩数据表格,并将其与詹姆斯·法灵顿医生(1824-1859)的统计数据进行了比较。法灵顿医生比玛莎晚出生一代,当时助产士已不再受青睐,医生们转而采用放血疗法和鸦片衍生物(如鸦片酊)进行分娩。 33我们困惑于人们对助产士的看法似乎发生了巨大的变化:从18世纪初玛莎站在医生旁边进行尸检,到不到20年后一位哈佛教授写道:“我们不能像教导男性那样教导女性医学知识;我们不能把她们带进解剖室……而不摧毁那些对助产士和女性这一职业至关重要的道德品质。” 34

Such excerpts formed one part of our inquiry. We also examined tables of delivery data compiled by Ulrich from Martha's diary, and compared these with statistics from Dr. James Farrington (1824–59), born a generation after Martha, when midwifery had fallen into disfavor and doctors had turned to bloodletting and the use of opium derivatives such as laudanum during delivery.33 We puzzled over what seemed to be dramatic changes in how midwives were viewed, from the turn of the eighteenth century, when Martha stood beside doctors at an autopsy, to less than twenty years later, when a Harvard professor wrote that “we cannot instruct women as we do men in the science of medicine; we cannot carry them into the dissecting room…without destroying those moral qualities of character which are essential to the office” of midwife and woman.34

在修正和扩充原有教科书内容的基础上,我们进一步质疑了那些鲜为人知、却指导教科书写作的假设。当我们把教科书与乌尔里希的叙述并置时,这些假设便凸显出来。劳雷尔·撒切尔·乌尔里希在她讲述的故事中现身,分享了她如何从最模糊的线索中拼凑出殖民时期新英格兰错综复杂的社会关系;她如何沉浸于草药学的世界,解读那些晦涩难懂的传统疗法典故;以及为了理解玛莎的丈夫以法莲的工作,她如何不得不学习十八、十九世纪锯木厂的运作方式。

From correcting and expanding the initial textbook account, we ventured on to question the rarely articulated assumptions that guide the writing of textbooks. Such assumptions were thrown into relief when we placed the textbook alongside Ulrich's narrative. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is present in the story she tells, sharing how she pieced together the labyrinthine social relationships of colonial New England from the haziest of references; how she immersed herself in the world of herbal medicine to decode cryptic allusions to traditional remedies; how, in order to understand the work of Martha's husband, Ephraim, she had to learn about the operation of sawmills in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

随着我们对玛莎的世界和作品的深入了解,我们不禁联想到历史学家本人及其作品。面对“这本书什么时候才能完成?”这个挥之不去的问题,我们不禁惊叹于作者钢铁般的意志。35我们发现,如果不了解劳雷尔·撒切尔·乌尔里希,就无法了解玛莎·巴拉德。值得庆幸的是,这位历史学家并没有试图隐瞒自己的身份。事实上,乌尔里希毫不掩饰地将自己置于文本之中,例如,她描述了其他历史学家如何认为玛莎的日记“琐碎而无关紧要”。这种观点出自十九世纪的男性作家之口或许可以理解,但当一位二十世纪七十年代的女性主义历史学家将这本日记描述为“充斥着琐事”时,乌尔里希就无法接受了。

As we dove deeper into Martha's world and work, we could not help thinking about the world and work of the historian. We marveled at the author's steely resolve in the face of the persistent question: “When will the book be finished?”35 We found it impossible to learn about Martha Ballard without learning about Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. It helped that the historian made no attempt to hide. In fact, Ulrich placed herself squarely in the text, as, for example, when she described how other historians found Martha's diary “trivial and unimportant.” That such a view could come from men writing in the nineteenth century was, perhaps, understandable, but when a feminist history written in the 1970s characterized the diary as “filled with trivia” it was too much for Ulrich.

玛莎·巴拉德这本书的真正力量,恰恰在于它日常的、详尽的、重复的日常。如果只记录渡河的场景而不提及寒冷的日子里穿袜子的艰辛,如果只记录新生儿的诞生而不记录漫长的秋季里缠绕羽毛笔、腌制肉类和分拣卷心菜的劳作,那就等于破坏了这本真挚、坚定、温柔而又勇敢的记录的脉络……当玛莎被历史学家们忽略的“琐事”所触动或激发时,她会如实记录下来,既不像清教徒那样进行深刻的自我反省,也不像感伤主义者那样矫揉造作,而是以一种平实、客观,最终却令人难忘的声音。二十七年多的时间里,确切地说是9965天,她忠实地记录着这一切…… “如今这一年已然结束,”她在1800年12月31日写道,“如果我们能明智地利用这段时间,那该是多么幸福啊。”对她而言,生活的意义在于行动。没有什么是微不足道的。36

It is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies. To extract the river crossing without noting the cold days spent “footing” stockings, to abstract the births without recording the long autumns spent winding quills, pickling meat, and sorting cabbages, is to destroy the sinews of this earnest, steady, gentle, and courageous record…. when [Martha] felt overwhelmed or enlivened by the very “trivia” the historians have dismissed, she said so, not in the soul-searching manner of a Puritan nor with the literary self-consciousness of a sentimentalist, but in a plain, matter-of-fact, and in the end unforgettable voice. For more than twenty-seven years, 9,965 days to be exact, she faithfully kept her record…. “And now this year is come to a close” she wrote on December 31, 1800, “and happy is it if we have made a wise improvement of the time.” For her, living was to be measured in doing. Nothing was trivial.36

这段节选见证了过去半个世纪以来历史写作的深刻变革。历史叙事不再局限于伟大的治国之举,而是涵盖了诸如分娩等日常事件,以及普通人为生计奔波的日常生活。这段文字不仅反映了社会史和女权主义的影响,也突显了历史学家在叙述过去时扮演的更为积极主动的角色——这正是乌尔里希的写作与参与者们最熟悉的教科书式散文截然不同之处。作为叙述者的乌尔里希身临其境地讲述着她的故事,她对前任历史学家忽视玛莎日记的行为感到愤怒,她与主人公的耐心和决心感同身受,并在玛莎生命终结时流露出悲伤。通过展现助产士玛莎·巴拉德的形象,劳雷尔·撒切尔·乌尔里希也展现了她自己。从乌尔里希充满力量的叙述到玛莎不屈不挠的精神,这段节选在朗读时感动了在场的许多人,令他们潸然泪下。

This short excerpt bears witness to the profound changes in historical writing over the last half-century.37 Historical narrative is no longer restricted to great acts of statecraft but now encompasses everyday acts like childbirth and the daily routines of ordinary people trying to make ends meet. While this passage reflects the influence of social history and feminism, it also highlights the new, more active role of the historian in narrating the past—something that distinguished Ulrich's writing from the textbook prose that participants knew best. Ulrich the storyteller is in the thick of her story, sharing her anger at previous historian's dismissal of Martha's diary, identifying with her protagonist's patience and resolve, showing sadness as Martha's life comes to an end. In revealing Martha Ballard the midwife, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich reveals herself. From the power of Ulrich's voice to the power of Martha's indomitable spirit, this excerpt, when read aloud, moved several participants to tears.

科琳就是其中之一。作为一名小学校长,科琳上次学习历史还是在高中时期。她报名参加这个研讨会,是因为她的学校正在推行跨学科课程,她想了解历史如何与其他学科相结合。研讨会开始时,她坦言自己“记性不好”,这在她看来是历史研究中最重要的一项技能。但研讨会结束时,科琳却感到意外。她立刻被这些文献深深吸引,感同身受地体会到玛莎在家外无休止的工作,以及她作为母亲、职业女性、妻子和社区领袖所面临的多重角色冲突。对科琳来说,有机会接触原始资料是全新的体验。她觉得这让她精神焕发。在为期两天的研讨会上,她是发言最积极、最热情洋溢的参与者之一。

Colleen was one of them. An elementary school principal, Colleen had last studied history when she was a high school student. She signed up for the workshop because her school was moving toward an interdisciplinary curriculum and she wanted to understand how history might be combined with other subjects. At the start of the workshop, she admitted that she had a “bad memory” a statement of deficiency in the attribute she thought most important to historical study. But Colleen was surprised by the workshop's end. She was immediately drawn into these documents, identifying with Martha's endless cycle of work in and out of the home, and the competing demands of her roles as mother, career woman, wife, and community leader. The chance to work with original sources was new to Colleen, and she found it invigorating. During the two days of the workshop, she was among the most vocal and passionate participants.

第二天结束时,我们要求参与者“重写历史”,运用所学知识,就殖民时期和革命后美国女性在经济生活中的角色撰写一篇叙述。我们让他们选择修改乔丹教科书中的选段,或者放弃它,从头开始。科琳选择了放弃。她拿起笔,奋笔疾书,潦草地写了几句话,一边低声抱怨着教科书,一边把纸揉成一团,重新开始。她一口气写了三十五分钟,没有丝毫停顿。

At the end of the second day, we asked participants to “rewrite history” to take what they had learned and compose a narrative on the role of women in the economic life of colonial and post-Revolutionary America. We gave them the option of amending the selection from Jordan's textbook or putting it aside and starting from scratch. Colleen chose to put it aside. She took pen in hand and wrote furiously, scribbling a few sentences, muttering under her breath about how angry she was at the textbook, crumpling up the paper, and starting again. She wrote without interruption for thirty-five minutes.

你或许会预料到,科琳的文章会带有这种热情的痕迹,表达出她在研读文献时所感受到的各种情绪——从认同和认同到愤怒和怨恨。但事实并非如此。科琳的文字冷静客观,如同她试图摒弃的教科书式散文般枯燥乏味。她以第三人称叙述,力求客观,或者如她后来所说,“将个人情感排除在外”。在她这篇两页纸的叙述中,“我”这个字眼从未出现。文中也没有任何强调、评判和怀疑的迹象。诚然,内容有所改变。从科琳的描述中,我们了解到像玛莎·巴拉德这样的女性通过担任助产士、从事小规模纺织生产、饲养家禽以及其他各种活动,为殖民地经济做出了贡献。事实或许发生了变化,但文本的认识论立场却始终未变。

You might predict that Colleen's essay would bear the traces of this passion, giving voice to the range of emotions—from identification and recognition to anger and resentment—that she felt as she worked through the documents. But this was not the case. Colleen's detached writing trudged along like the textbook prose she sought to banish. Narrated in the third person, Colleen's account strove for objectivity, or, as she put it later, to “keep my emotions out of it.” Nowhere in her two-page history does the word “I” appear. Absent are indications of emphasis, judgment, and doubt. To be sure, the content had shifted. From Colleen we learn that women like Martha Ballard contributed to the colonial economy as midwives, by engaging in small-scale textile production, by raising poultry, and by myriad other activities. The facts may have changed, but the epistemological stance of the text remained firmly intact.

和之前的德里克一样,科琳也面临着两种截然不同的体验之间的冲突:一是阅读这些文本时的直接感受,二是过往的经历,尤其是高中时代的记忆。当她提笔写作时,却发现无法调和两种截然不同的感受——一方面,她认为历史轻视了她作为女性的身份;另一方面,她又认为撰写历史应该冷静、客观、科学。这种矛盾让她倍感沮丧。在重写历史的过程中,科琳直面了自己,但她并没有接纳这个自我,让它成为自己故事的一部分,而是将这项工作解读为一种自我抹杀——从故事中抹去她的激情、愤怒,甚至她作为母亲的经历。结果,在她的作品中,科琳的身影荡然无存。

Like Derek before her, Colleen faced a conflict between two spheres of experience: her immediate experience in reading these texts and her prior experiences, especially her memories from high school. Her frustration boiled over when she put pen to paper and could not find a way of resolving the belief that history had slighted her as a woman and the belief that when writing history one should be cool, dispassionate, scientific, objective. In rewriting history Colleen confronted herself, but rather than engage this self and make it a part of her story, she interpreted her job as one of self-effacement—removing from the story her passion, her anger, and even her own experience as a mother. As a result Colleen was nowhere to be found in her creation.

不受约束的激情会扭曲我们想要讲述的故事。平衡不同的视角需要我们退后一步,从其他角度看待事物,而当愤怒灼烧着我们的内心时,这无疑是极其困难的。但科琳却走向了另一个极端。她非但没有弥补自己的过错,反而……通过与读者分享主观感受,她试图构建一个没有讲述者的故事——通过假装内心深处的情感不存在来处理它们。最终,在原始文献中鲜活呈现的玛莎·巴拉德,在科琳自己撰写的文献中,又回归到一幅静物画中。

Unrestrained, passion distorts the story we seek to tell. The balancing of perspectives requires us to step back and see things in other ways, an exceedingly difficult thing to do when anger sears our gut. But Colleen went to the other extreme. Rather than compensating for her subjectivity by sharing it with her reader, she tried to construct a story without a teller—to deal with her deep feelings by pretending that they did not exist. In the end, Martha Ballard, a person brought to life in the primary documents, returned to a still life in the document Colleen herself composed.

具有讽刺意味的是,科琳的文本与乔丹的《美国人》比与乌尔里希的《助产士的故事》更为相似。对于科琳和其他研讨会参与者来说,这本教科书及其所象征的一切,不再是传承过去故事的一种方式,而是唯一的方式。

Ironically, then, Colleen's text bore a greater resemblance to Jordan's The Americans than to Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale. The textbook and all that it symbolized became for Colleen, and other workshop participants, not one way of transmitting the story of the past, but the only way.

语境的编织

THE WEAVING OF CONTEXT

我们该如何应对熟悉与陌生之间的张力?我们该如何既拥抱与过去共享的一切,又对那些可能让我们震惊、促使我们重新思考人性本质的方面保持开放态度?遥远的过去——古埃及的丧葬习俗、中世纪的医疗实践、塞勒姆女巫绞刑:这些都以其陌生感震撼着我们。但对于更近的过去呢?一个与我们相似的时代,拥有电视、收音机、汽车和飞机,表面上与现在几乎无异,只是服饰和发型略显过时的时代?我们该如何看待这段过去,才能让它不仅仅是现在褪色的影子?

How do we navigate the tension between the familiar and the strange? How do we embrace what we share with the past but remain open to aspects that might startle us into reconsidering what it means to be human? The distant past—the burial practices of ancient Egypt, the medical practices of the Middle Ages, the hanging of witches in Salem: These jar us with their strangeness. But what about the more recent past, a time like ours with televisions, radios, cars, and planes, a time that looks superficially like the present except for old-fashioned clothes and hairstyles? How do we approach this past so that it emerges as something more than a faded version of the present?

当我到访西雅图一所高中旁听一个班级观看PBS系列纪录片《目光聚焦奖》(Eyes on the Prize)时,这些问题变得尤为突出。我到达的那天,学生们刚刚观看了罗斯·巴内特州长强行阻止詹姆斯·梅雷迪斯在密西西比大学注册入学的片段。在随后的讨论中,老师问学生们巴内特为何反对梅雷迪斯入学。一个男孩举手回答说:“因为偏见。”老师点点头,讨论继续进行。

These questions came into focus when I visited a Seattle high school to observe a class that had watched the PBS series “Eyes on the Prize.” On the day I arrived, students had seen the segment in which Governor Ross Barnett physically bars James Meredith from registering at Ole Miss. In the ensuing discussion, the teacher asked students why Barnett objected to Meredith's enrollment. One boy raised his hand and volunteered, “Prejudice.” The teacher nodded and the discussion moved on.

仅仅用“偏见”这个词就让我感到不安。四百年的种族历史竟然被简化成一个词?38这让我不禁思考,究竟要到什么时候,我们才能开始从历史的角度思考“偏见”、“种族主义”、“宽容”、“公平”和“平等”这些概念?我们究竟要到什么时候才能意识到,这些抽象概念并非凌驾于时空之上的超验真理,而是植根于特定历史时刻的思维模式,它们在一代又一代人中发展、成长,并以新的形式出现,同时又保留着其最初的痕迹?39如果罗斯·巴内特的问题是他“有偏见”,那么这些学生和他们的老师又会如何看待亚伯拉罕·林肯呢?根据社会风尚和当前需要,他被冠以“伟大的解放者”或“白人至上主义者”等各种称号?40

That simple “prejudice” unsettled me. Four hundred years of racial history reduced to a one-word response?38 This set me to wondering what would it take before we begin to think historically about such concepts as “prejudice” “racism” “tolerance” “fairness” and “equity.” At what point do we come to see these abstractions not as transcendent truths soaring above time and place, but as patterns of thought that take root in particular historical moments, develop, grow, and emerge in new forms in successive generations while still bearing traces of their former selves?39 If Ross Barnett's problem was that he was “prejudiced” how would these students and their teachers regard Abraham Lincoln, variously dubbed the “Great Emancipator” or “White Supremacist” depending on social fashion and current need?40

为了研究这个问题,我收集了一系列文献,将亚伯拉罕·林肯的言论与他同时代一些人的声音结合起来:斯蒂芬·道格拉斯,林肯在1858年伊利诺伊州参议员竞选中的对手;约翰·贝尔·罗宾逊和约翰·范·埃弗里,这两位宗教种族主义者援引《圣经》为奴隶制辩护;以及威廉·劳埃德·加里森,这位为解放奴隶而孜孜不倦的废奴主义者。 41在同一组文献中,我收录了林肯的三份文件,每份都反映了他人生中的不同境况:1841年,他作为一位敏锐的观察者沿密西西比河而上,看到奴隶们被锁链捆绑在一起,“就像钓线上的鱼一样”;1862年,他作为一位候选人,在伊利诺伊州渥太华市,面对着一群大多支持道格拉斯的听众,与斯蒂芬·道格拉斯进行辩论;1862年,他作为一位饱受战争蹂躏、疲惫不堪的总统,向一群获得自由的奴隶讲述在中美洲建立自由民殖民地的可能性。

To study this question, I put together a series of documents that combined the words of Abraham Lincoln with the voices of some of his contemporaries: Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's opponent for the 1858 Senate seat from Illinois; John Bell Robinson and John Van Evrie, religious racialists who looked to the Bible for justification of slavery; and William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist who worked tirelessly for emancipation.41 In the same document set I included three documents by Lincoln, each reflecting a different situation in his life: the keen observer traveling up the Mississippi in 1841 and seeing slaves chained together “like so many fish upon a trot-line”; the candidate, debating Stephen Douglas before a largely pro-Douglas crowd in Ottawa, Illinois; and the beleaguered, war-weary president, addressing a group of freed slaves in 1862 about the possibility of founding a freedmen's colony in Central America.

我向一群大学历史系学生和非历史系学生展示了这些文献,他们都参加了为期五年的公立学校教师培训项目。我请他们阅读这些文献,并告诉我这些文献如何阐释林肯的思想。尽管参与者的回答各不相同,但有两个主要趋势尤为突出。一部分人完全按照字面意思理解林肯的言论。他们认为这些言论直接展现了林肯的内心世界,不受当时具体情境或1860年至今时间流逝的影响。他们认为林肯就是个种族主义者,仅此而已。而另一部分更为细致的读者则意识到,这些言论需要一定的语境。但他们并没有从这些文献提供的原始材料中构建语境,而是从他们所处的时代社会环境中寻找语境。

I presented these documents to a group of college history majors and nonmajors, all of whom were enrolled in a fifth-year program to become public school teachers. I asked them to read through these documents and tell me what light they shed on Lincoln's thought. Although there was great variety in participant's responses, two broad trends stood out. One group took Lincoln's words at face value. They saw these words as offering a direct window into Lincoln's mind, unobstructed by either the particular circumstances in which they were uttered or the passage of time between 1860 and today. Lincoln was a racist, pure and simple. Other, more careful, readers recognized that they needed a context for these words. But rather than fashioning a context from the raw materials provided by these documents, they borrowed a context from their contemporary social world.

面对林肯立场中看似矛盾之处,我们手头拥有一系列当代社会形式和机构——新闻发布会、公关人员、互动热线——使我们能够迅速调和各种相互矛盾的信息。即便我们意识到1860年至今政治进程中发生了巨大的技术变革,我们仍然常常感受到跨越时空的思维方式上的共通之处。在许多大学生的解读中,林肯和道格拉斯仿佛成了戴着高礼帽的当代人,就像詹姆斯·米切纳小说中的人物,他们穿着奇装异服,但言行举止却与我们的邻居如出一辙。

Faced with seeming incongruities in Lincoln's position, we have at hand an array of contemporary social forms and institutions—press conferences, spin doctors, response dials—which allow us instantly to harmonize discrepant information. Even if we recognize the vast technological changes in the political process between 1860 and today, we often perceive a unity in ways of thinking that span the breach of time. In many readings by college students, Lincoln and Douglas become our contemporaries in top hats, much like characters from a James Michener novel who happen to dress funny but whose behavior and mannerisms are those of our next-door neighbors.

换句话说,“当下主义”——即用当下的视角看待过去——并非我们养成的一种坏习惯。相反,它是我们一种自然而然的心理状态,一种无需费力就能自然而然形成的思维方式。如果林肯的言论看似自相矛盾,那是因为他面对的是两个不同的听众。在我们这个世界里,我们完全明白为什么小布什会对堪萨斯州的麦农说一套,对纽约市的股票经纪人说另一套。通过解读林肯言论中的矛盾之处,我们把他变成了我们中的一员:他的目标是赢得选举,而且他有公关团队协助他。 42

In other words, “presentism”—the act of viewing the past through the lens of the present—is not some bad habit we've fallen into. It is, instead, our psychological condition at rest, a way of thinking that requires little effort and comes quite naturally. If Lincoln seems to be saying two different things, it is because he is speaking to two different audiences, for in our world we know exactly why George W. Bush says one thing to Kansas wheat farmers and another to New York City stockbrokers. In resolving contradictions in Lincoln's words, we turn him into one of us: His goal is to get elected, and he has spin doctors to help.42

为了拓展研究范围,我请几位在职历史学家阅读了同样的文献。他们当中有些人对林肯非常了解,甚至写过关于他的书;而另一些人则只懂一些本科概论课上讲几节课的内容。鲍勃·奥尔斯顿是一位中年白人美国史专家,就属于后者。和系里的大多数同事一样,他教授涵盖美国历史各个方面的本科概论课程,但他的大部分高年级和研究生课程都属于另一个专业领域。读研究生时,他参加过有关南北战争的考试,但此后并没有深入研究过这一时期。

I broadened my study by asking several working historians to read these same documents. Some of them knew a great deal about Lincoln and had written books about him; others knew little more than what was required to give a few lectures in an undergraduate survey course.43 Bob Alston, a middle-aged Caucasian Americanist, fit into the latter group. Like most members of his department, he taught undergraduate survey courses spanning all of American history, but the majority of his upper-level and graduate courses were in a different specialization. During graduate school, he had taken examinations that covered the Civil War but had not studied this period extensively since then.

阿尔斯顿的处境并不轻松,起初他的阅读水平几乎与那些能力更强的大学生无异。从文件1,即道格拉斯在渥太华的开场白中,阿尔斯顿坦然面对自己知识的匮乏:

Alston did not have an easy time, and in the beginning his reading is virtually indistinguishable from those of the stronger college students. From Document 1, Douglas' opening statement at Ottawa, Alston stared his lack of knowledge in the face:

我对林肯的观点了解得并不像我想象的那么多。我的意思是,读着道格拉斯的文字,感觉他似乎在替林肯说话,这让我对自己对林肯的了解程度产生了怀疑。道格拉斯似乎认为林肯相信黑人和白人在几乎所有方面都是平等的,但我不知道林肯究竟在多大程度上相信这一点。我知道他非常务实地意识到,在当时的社会中,要让黑人和白人平等地生活在一起,会带来诸多问题,但我对林肯的观点了解不够深入,无法做出其他一些判断。

I don't know as much about Lincoln's views as I thought I did. I mean, as I read it and see Douglas perhaps putting words in Lincoln's mouth, I'm not quite sure about what I do and don't know about Lincoln. Douglas makes it sound as if Lincoln believes they're equal, blacks and whites, on virtually every level but I don't know to what extent Lincoln did or did not believe that. I know that he was very practically aware of the concerns of bringing them together as if they were equal in the same society at this point, but I don't know enough about Lincoln's views to make some other judgments I've been making.

在第二份文件中,林肯对道格拉斯的反驳中,林肯表示他“无意在种族间推行政治和社会平等”。此时,阿尔斯顿停顿了一下:“我再读一遍这句话。我再次思考,如果道格拉斯关于林肯认为两人平等的说法超出了林肯所定义的政治和社会平等的范畴,那么这种说法是否还有几分道理。”七行之后,阿尔斯顿再次停顿:“我回去再读一遍…… ”这些十九世纪的演说家说话时使用的句子更加复杂。他们不习惯使用简短精炼的语句。我想知道他说的“生理差异”是什么意思。

In the second document, Lincoln's rebuttal of Douglas, Lincoln states that he has “no purpose to introduce political and social equality” between the races. At this point Alston paused: “Just rereading the sentence again. Again trying to think about how Douglas' statement about Lincoln thinking the two were equal could have some truth if it falls outside the realm of what Lincoln identifies as political and social equality.” Seven lines later, Alston stopped again: “I'm going back and rereading the sentence. These nineteenth-century orators spoke in more complicated sentences. They weren't used to sound bites. I'm wondering what he means by ‘physical difference’ ”:

如果黑人拥有“生命、自由和追求幸福的自然权利”,那么人们自然会认为,自由和追求幸福意味着他们不能同时沦为奴隶。同样地,如果黑人拥有“吃自己劳动所得的权利”,即他们有权获得自己劳动的成果,也就是追求幸福或自由(无论以何种形式),那么如果这是一种自然权利,奴隶制就违背了这些自然权利。

If blacks have the “natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” one would assume that liberty and pursuit of happiness would indicate that they cannot be slaves at the same time. Similarly, if blacks have the “right to eat the bread which his own hand earns” that they have the right to the product of their labor, that is the pursuit of happiness or liberty, one form or the other, then if that is a natural right then slavery goes against those natural rights.

当大学生们读到这里时,他们往往会把这种矛盾归咎于林肯,或者臆造出多个林肯,让他们对不同的人说不同的话。但阿尔斯顿并没有试图消除这种矛盾,而是指出了它。在接下来的五份文献阅读中,他进行了一次漫长的“指出无知”的练习。他平均每份文献提出4.2个问题,并用“我掌握的信息不够”或“这对我来说毫无意义”之类的标记来强调他不了解的内容,总共出现了14次。直到最后,阿尔斯顿才得出了一个类似解释的结论。这个结论源于他对约翰·贝尔·罗宾逊诉诸上帝为奴隶制辩护的那段文字的回应。此时,阿尔斯顿发表了如下评论(星号表示他在阅读过程中翻阅了之前文献的地方):

When the college students reached this point, they tended to locate this contradiction in Lincoln or created multiple Lincolns who said different things to different people. But Alston responded by calling attention to the contradiction, not dissolving it. Over the next five documents, his reading was a prolonged exercise in the “specification of ignorance.” He asked, on average, 4.2 questions per document, and underscored what he did not know with markers such as “I don't have enough to go on” or “This makes no sense to me” a total of fourteen times. Only at the end of the task did Alston come up with something resembling an interpretation. It came in response to the passage in which John Bell Robinson appeals to God as providing a sanction for slavery. At this point Alston made the following comment (asterisks indicate places in the reading where he flipped back to previous documents):

林肯谈到上帝赋予黑人某些特质,但他并未提及“作为奴隶的用途”或奴隶身份。[我打算]查阅一些早期的[文献]。我正在寻找他关于黑人与白人之间生理差异的论述,以及他对自然权利的论述,看看他是否将这些与上帝联系起来。*是道格拉斯*将林肯关于黑人的信仰与上帝和《独立宣言》联系起来。但在林肯的回复中,*他提到了——我在这里寻找关于上帝的论述——我还没找到,但我还没完成——他提到了《独立宣言》。但在给玛丽·斯皮德的信中,*他确实说过“上帝使人类最糟糕的境遇变得可以忍受,这真是至理名言”。但根据林肯的说法,上帝并没有使奴隶制成为黑人应该身处的境地。林肯在这些问题上总是跑题,他谈到《独立宣言》*,谈到自然权利——我不确定这些概念在他脑海中从何而来——他还谈到自然差异。但他除了说上帝创造、上帝允许人们将最糟糕的人类境况变得可以忍受*之外,并没有把上帝扯进来。这是一种怜悯,而不是对他们的地位或行为的任何限制。我的想法是——道格拉斯*指责林肯说黑人从一开始就享有平等的权利《独立宣言》与上帝。林肯在这些文件中没有提到上帝。他没有谈到上帝,只是谈到了《独立宣言》*和自然权利,无论这些权利源自何处。

Lincoln…talks about Blacks being endowed with certain things from God, but “usefulness as slaves” or a status of slaves isn't one of the things that he mentions. [I'm going to] look at some of the earlier [documents]. What I'm looking for is his discussion [of] the physical difference between the two and his discussion of natural rights [to] see if he links those at all to God.* It was Douglas* who linked Lincoln to believe about the Negro to God and the Declaration of Independence. But in this,*in Lincoln's reply, he refers—I'm looking here for reference to God—I'm not finding it but I haven't finished yet, he refers to the Declaration of Independence. But in the letter to Mary Speed* he did say “how true it is that God renders the worst of human conditions tolerable.” But God didn't render slavery a condition that Blacks ought to find themselves in, according to Lincoln. Lincoln keeps going out of it in these things, he talks about the Declaration of Independence,* he talks about natural rights—I'm not sure where these come from in his mind—and he talks about natural differences. But he does not bring God into it other than to say that God makes, God allows people to make the worst of human conditions tolerable.* And that's a form of mercy, not of any kind of restriction on their status or behavior. What I thought—Douglas* has accused Lincoln of saying that Blacks had equal rights from the Declaration of Independence and God. Lincoln didn't say that in these things. [He didn't say] anything about God, just the Declaration of Independence* and natural rights, wherever those come from.

这是一段内容丰富的摘录,本身就值得解读。约翰·贝尔·罗宾逊提及上帝引发了困惑,促使阿尔斯顿重新审视林肯对道格拉斯的回应。在那里,他寻找林肯对上帝的呼唤。然而,他只找到了对《独立宣言》的引用,于是这位历史学家又回到了道格拉斯的开场白。随后,他又查阅了玛丽·斯皮德于1841年写的一封信,信中也出现了“上帝”一词,但其含义与罗宾逊的呼唤截然不同。从斯皮德的信出发,阿尔斯顿再次回到第二份文件——林肯对道格拉斯的回应,以进一步探究其中对《独立宣言》和“自然权利”的引用。

This is a dense excerpt that itself merits interpretation. John Bell Robinson's reference to God sparked confusion and sent Alston back to Lincoln's response to Douglas. There, he searched for Lincoln's invocation of God. Finding only a reference to the Declaration of Independence, the historian returned to Douglas' opening statement. He then jumped to the letter by Mary Speed, written in 1841, where the word “God” is found but with very different connotations from Robinson's invocation. From the Speed letter Alston went back to the second document, Lincoln's response to Douglas, for another look at the reference to the Declaration of Independence and “natural rights.”

在这段曲折的评论中,阿尔斯顿八次引用了之前的文献。他了解到,罗宾逊诉诸上帝来为奴隶制辩护,认为奴隶制是低等人类的专属制度;而林肯则诉诸上帝,强调种族间的共同人性。通过这种互文性,阿尔斯顿认识到,林肯并非诉诸上帝,而是诉诸“自然权利”来为非洲人的平等辩护——这种对林肯的解读与理查德·韦弗的“定义论证”解释极为接近。 44尽管阿尔斯顿一开始感到困惑且充满疑问,但他最终对林肯的立场有了细致入微且深刻的理解。

In the course of this zigzagging comment, Alston referred to the previous documents eight times. He learned that whereas Robinson appeals to God to justify slavery as an institution appropriate for a lower form of manhood, Lincoln appeals to God to connect the races in common humanity. Through this intertextual weave, Alston learned that Lincoln justifies the equality of Africans, not by appealing to God, but by appealing to “natural rights” a view of Lincoln that comes remarkably close to Richard Weaver's “argument by definition” interpretation.44 Although Alston started the task confused and full of questions, he ended up with a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of Lincoln's position.

阿尔斯顿在此所做的工作被“将林肯置于语境中”或“将其置于语境中”的概念所误解,这些动词让人联想到拼图游戏,将碎片拼入预先存在的框架中。语境既非“发现”也非“定位”,文字也非“置于”语境中。语境(Context)一词源于拉丁语contexere,意为编织,指积极地将事物以某种模式连接起来。阿尔斯顿在此创造了一种全新的事物,一种在他研究这些文献并直面自身无知之前并不存在的东西。

What Alston did here is misrepresented by notions of “placing” or “putting” Lincoln into context, verbs that conjure up images of jigsaw puzzles in which pieces are slotted into pre-existing frames. Contexts are neither “found” nor “located” and words are not “put” into context. Context, from the Latin contexere, means to weave together, to engage in an active process of connecting things in a pattern. Alston made something new here, something that did not exist before he engaged these documents and confronted his ignorance.

阿尔斯顿提出的问题,正是他创造的工具,存在于他现有知识与过往经历之间的空白地带。阿尔斯顿无疑是一位专家,但并非通常意义上的专家。他的专长不在于他对这个主题的全面了解,而在于他跌倒后能够迅速重新站起来,找到自己未知的领域,并制定路线图来指导新的学习。他擅长激发困惑。正是阿尔斯顿能够跳出第一印象的局限,质疑自己仓促的判断。他需要用心思考,并记录下那些引导他走向新知识方向的问题。这种方法需要技巧、方法和丰富的知识。但成熟的历史认知远不止于此:它是一种触动心灵的行为。

The questions Alston asked are the tools of creation, dwelling in the space between his present knowledge and the circumstances of the past. Alston is an expert, to be sure, but not in the sense in which that term is typically used. His expertise lay not in his sweeping knowledge of this topic but in his ability to pick himself up after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a road map to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultivating puzzlement. It was Alston's ability to stand back from first impressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, and to keep track of his questions that together pointed him in the direction of new learning. Such an approach requires skill, technique, and a great deal of know-how. But mature historical cognition is more: It is an act that engages the heart.

例如,当奥尔斯顿读到林肯在对获释奴隶的讲话中所说的“我们有一些人……能够像白人一样思考”这句话时,他不仅对这句话的措辞感到困惑,而且明显受到了冲击。然而,奥尔斯顿并没有因为林肯是种族主义者而得出同样的结论,而是反复研读了几份文献,试图消除这种不适感。当他摇头说“我不知道林肯在说什么”时,他指的并非是字面上的文字让他困惑,而是更深层次的问题:他困惑于这些文字所构建的世界,一个一个人可以去市场上买卖他人的世界。在这个世界里,林肯的话语究竟意味着什么45作为一名现代历史学家,他究竟有哪些认知上的局限,以至于无法完全理解林肯的世界?

So, for example, when Alston encountered the phrase “we have men…capable of thinking as White men” uttered by Lincoln in his address to the freed slaves, he was not only confused by the language but also visibly shaken by it. But rather than resolving his discomfort by concluding that Lincoln was a racist, Alston sat with this discomfort over the course of several documents. When he said, shaking his head, “I don't know what Lincoln is saying” he did not mean that he was confused by the words on the page, but something much larger: that he was confused by the world conjured up by these words, a world in which one human being could go to the market to buy others. What could Lincoln's words mean in that world?45 And what did he as a modern historian not know that prevented him from fully entering Lincoln's world?

阿尔斯顿的解读展现了他对我们当代经验的狭隘性的谦逊,以及他对人类历史的广阔性的开放。他通过质疑我们能否像了解自己一样轻易地了解过去的人,给予他们信任。这并非意味着我们不能评判过去——我们无法避免做出评判。但这确实意味着我们不应仓促下结论。其他读者利用这些文献来印证他们先前的信念。他们在这里接触过去,并给它贴上标签。而阿尔斯顿接触过去,并从中学习。

Alston's reading shows a humility before the narrowness of our contemporary experience and an openness before the expanse of the history of the species. It grants people in the past the benefit of the doubt by casting doubt on our ability to know them as easily as we know ourselves. This does not mean that we cannot judge the past—we cannot help making judgments. But it does mean that we must not rush to judgment. Other readers used these documents to confirm their prior beliefs. They encountered the past here and labeled it. Alston encountered the past and learned from it.

是独角兽还是犀牛?

A UNICORN OR A RHINOCEROS?

几年前,我去看了《辛德勒的名单》。我早就熟悉史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格的作品——哪个家长不熟悉呢?——所以一开始我还有些忐忑。电影一开始就深深吸引了我,但多年后,最让我记忆犹新的却是片尾字幕结束后发生的事。我看到前面那位男士转向他的妻子说:“直到现在,我才真正理解当时发生的一切。现在,我明白了。”

Several years ago I went to see Schindler's List. I had long been acquainted with Steven Spielberg's oeuvre—what parent isn't?—so I was wary. I was drawn into the movie immediately, but what stays with me years later is what happened after the final credits rolled. I watched the man in front of me turn to his wife and say, “I never understood what happened then until now, right now. Now, I know.”

我不想对这条评论做过多解读,只想指出,正是这段在克拉科夫实地拍摄的当代片段,孕育了这位男士的理解。当我坐在剧院里时,我的思绪落在了意大利化学家普里莫·莱维提出的理解难题上,他关于大屠杀的著作,既抒情又令人难以忘怀。总是能提供真知灼见。“在我们被问到的问题中,”列维写道,“有一个问题从未缺席;事实上,随着岁月的流逝,这个问题被反复提及,并且越来越带有指责的意味。” 46列维所指的问题实际上包含三个部分:

I don't want to read too much into this comment, other than to note that it was a fragment of the present, shot on location in Krakow, that gave birth to this man's understanding. As I sat in the theater, my thoughts settled on the puzzle of understanding set by the Italian chemist Primo Levi, whose writings on the Holocaust, lyrical and haunting, always offer insight. “Among the questions that are put to us” wrote Levi, “one question is never absent; indeed, as the years go by, it is formulated with ever increasing persistence and with an ever less hidden accent of accusation.”46 The question Levi refers to actually has three parts:

 

 

1.你为什么不逃跑?

1. Why did you not escape?

2.你为什么不反抗?

2. Why did you not rebel?

3.为什么在他们“抓到你”之前你没有逃脱?

3. Why did you not evade capture before they “got to you”?

利维描述了他在一所小学与一群五年级学生交流时发生的事情:

Levi describes what happened when he spoke to a group of fifth graders in an elementary school:

一个看起来很机警的男孩,显然是班里的尖子生,问了我一个例行问题:“可是你怎么没逃走呢?”我简单地向他解释了我在这里写的内容。他似乎不太相信,便让我在黑板上画一张营地的草图,标出瞭望塔、大门、铁丝网和发电站的位置。我尽力画了,三十双专注的眼睛盯着我。我的对话者看了几秒钟,又问了我几个问题,然后向我展示了他制定的计划:晚上,在这里割断哨兵的喉咙;然后,穿上他的衣服;之后立刻跑到那边的发电站,切断电源,这样探照灯就会熄灭,高压铁丝网也会失效;之后我就可以毫无麻烦地离开了。他严肃地补充道:“如果再发生这种事,就按我说的做。你会发现你能做到。” 47

An alert-looking boy, apparently at the head of the class, asked me the obligatory question: “But how come you didn't escape?” I briefly explained to him what I have written here. Not quite convinced, he asked me to draw a sketch of the camp on the blackboard indicating the location of the watch towers, the gates, the barbed wire, and the power station. I did my best, watched by thirty pairs of intent eyes. My interlocutor studied the drawing for a few instants, asked me for a few further clarifications, then he presented to me the plan he had worked out: here, at night, cut the throat of the sentinel; then, put on his clothes; immediately after this, run over there to the power station and cut off the electricity, so the search lights would go out and the high tension fence would be deactivated; after that I could leave without any trouble. He added seriously: “If it should happen to you again, do as I told you. You'll see that you'll be able to do it.”47

这个男孩做到了我们对学生的所有期望。他积极参与课堂讨论,运用自己的知识储备,提出问题并给出解答。我们不应将男孩的问题归咎于他年纪尚小,而应记住,比他年长得多、知识渊博得多的人也曾提出过同样的问题。对于这个男孩,就像对于我们许多人一样,利维的经历令人难以置信:这个孩子无法理解,在他看来如此显而易见的事情,竟然会有那么多人视而不见。

This boy did everything we want from our students. He engaged with the subject matter, he drew on his background knowledge, he formulated questions and offered solutions. Lest we attribute the boy's question to his tender age, we should bear in mind that these same questions have been posed by people far older and far more knowledgeable. For this boy, as for many of us, Levi's experience inspires incredulity: This youngster cannot believe that so many could miss what is, in his mind, so very plain.

在回应中,普里莫·莱维呼应了我在此探讨的核心主题之一:依赖我们“生活经验”的维度来了解过去人们的诱惑力。但对莱维而言,问题远不止于历史认知。正如他所说,我们“无法感知他人的经验”,这同样适用于现在。 48正因如此,历史研究对我们这个时代至关重要,因为在当今时代,人际关系问题主导着国家议程。了解他人,无论他们生活在铁路的另一边还是千年的另一端,都需要接受教育。我们的感知力。历史,如果教得好,就能让我们练习如何做到这一点。矛盾的是,让我们能够了解他人的,恰恰是我们对自身了解他人能力的怀疑,是对自身非凡的意义建构能力的怀疑——正是这种能力让我们得以构建周围的世界。

In his response, Primo Levi echoes one of the central themes that I have explored here: the seductiveness of coming to know people in the past by relying on the dimensions of our “lived experience.” But for Levi the problem is broader than one of historical knowing. Our “inability to perceive the experience of others” as he put it, applies to the present no less than the past.48 This is why the study of history is so crucial to our present day and age, when issues of persity dominate the national agenda. Coming to know others, whether they live on the other side of the tracks or the other side of the millennium, requires the education of our sensibilities. This is what history, when taught well, gives us practice in doing. Paradoxically, what allows us to come to know others is our distrust in our capacity to know them, a skepticism about the extraordinary sense-making abilities that allow us to construct the world around us.

对理性产物的怀疑有时会滑向愤世嫉俗或唯我论。但这并非必然。意识到我们在他人身上看到的矛盾或许更能反映我们自身,正是理性博爱的种子。这种理解能够对抗自恋。因为自恋者以自身的形象看待世界——无论是过去还是现在。成熟的历史认知教导我们反其道而行之:超越自身的形象,超越短暂的生命,超越我们出生的人类历史长河中转瞬即逝的瞬间。历史以最深刻的意义上进行教育(拉丁语意为“引领向外”)。在世俗课程中,历史最擅长传授那些曾经属于神学范畴的美德——面对自身认知能力的局限而保持谦逊,以及面对浩瀚的人类历史而心怀敬畏。

A skepticism toward the products of mind can sometimes slide into cynicism or solipsism. But this need not be the case. The awareness that the contradictions we see in others may tell us more about ourselves is the seed of intellectual charity. It is an understanding that counters narcissism. For the narcissist sees the world—both the past and the present—in his own image. Mature historical knowing teaches us to do the opposite: to go beyond our own image, to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in human history into which we have been born. History educates (“leads outward” in the Latin) in the deepest sense. Of the subjects in the secular curriculum, it is the best at teaching those virtues once reserved for theology—humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of human history.

威尼斯旅行家马可·波罗从中国前往印度的途中,冒险进入了巴斯曼岛(当时人们认为是苏门答腊岛),在那里他偶然发现了一种他从未见过的物种:犀牛。但波罗并不这么认为。正如他的日记所记载,他看到的却是……

On his journey from China to India, the Venetian traveler Marco Polo ventured into Basman, believed to be Sumatra, where he chanced upon a species he had never before seen: the rhinoceros. But Polo did not see it that way. As his diary records, he saw instead

独角兽体型几乎与大象相当。它们长着水牛般的毛发……[并且]额头正中央长着一根又大又黑的角。它们不用角攻击,只用舌头和膝盖;因为它们的舌头上长着又长又尖的刺……它们长相丑陋……完全不像我们描述的那样……当它们被处女俘虏时的样子。49

unicorns, which are scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo…[and] a single large, black horn in the middle of the forehead. They do not attack with their horn, but only with their tongue and their knees; for their tongues are furnished with long, sharp spines…. They are very ugly brutes to look at…not at all such as we describe them when…they let themselves be captured by virgins.49

我们与历史的邂逅让我们面临一个选择:了解犀牛还是了解独角兽。我们自然而然地倾向于独角兽——它们更漂亮,也更温顺。但犀牛能教会我们的远超我们想象的。

Our encounter with history presents us with a choice: to learn about rhinoceroses or to learn about unicorns. We naturally incline toward unicorns—they are prettier and more tame. But it is the rhinoceros that can teach us far more than we could ever imagine.

笔记

NOTES

本章最初是我在1997年1月于纽约举行的美国历史学会年会上发表的演讲,后刊登于《Phi Delta Kappan》(1999年3月)。撰写本章时,我试图做到两点:一是梳理我自上世纪八十年代末以来在历史教学与学习方面所做的概念性工作;二是就席卷全美的“标准之争”发表自己的看法。之前的版本得益于Peter Seixas、Peter Stearns、Susan Mosborg、Debby Kerdeman、David Lowenthal、Veronica Boix Mansilla和Howard等人的评论。感谢加德纳、克里斯·布朗宁、肯特·朱厄尔,以及海法大学“历史认知面面观”研讨会上那些洞察力敏锐却又温和的成员们(1997-1998)。感谢《卡潘》杂志的赖斯·科本提供的宝贵编辑意见和鼓励。在此,我向他们所有人致以谢意。

 

This chapter began as a talk given at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held in New York in January 1997. It appeared in print in the Phi Delta Kappan (March 1999). In writing it, I tried to do two things: to bring conceptual order to the work on historical teaching and learning that I had done since the late eighties, and to weigh in on the “standards war” raging from coast to coast. Previous versions benefited from comments by Peter Seixas, Peter Stearns, Susan Mosborg, Debby Kerdeman, David Lowenthal, Veronica Boix Mansilla, Howard Gardner, Chris Browning, Kent Jewell, and the perspicacious but gentle members of the “Aspects of Historical Cognition” seminar at the University of Haifa (1997–98). Rise Koben at the Kappan provided priceless editorial feedback and encouragement. I thank them all.

 

1.引自 Gary B. Nash、Charlotte Crabtree 和 Ross E. Dunn合著的《历史受审:文化战争与历史的教学》纽约,1997 年),第 232 页。

1. Cited in Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997), 232.

2.同上,第 234 页

2. Ibid., 234.

3.同上,第 197 页

3. Ibid., 197.

4.同上,第 204 页

4. Ibid., 204.

5.同上,第 245 页

5. Ibid., 245.

6.同上,第10-11页。正如托德·吉特林所指出的,历史之争不能简单地归结为左右政治斗争,而是演变为左翼内部激烈的内讧。参见吉特林在其著作《共同梦想的黄昏:美国为何饱受文化战争的蹂躏》(纽约,1995年)中对加州奥克兰教科书采用过程的描述。

6. Ibid., 10–11. As Todd Gitlin points out, the history wars cannot be reduced to a simple left/right political struggle but have manifested as bitter internecine struggles within the left itself. See Gitlin's account of the Oakland, California, textbook adoption process in The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York, 1995).

7.美国学者》 67(1998 年冬季),91。

7. American Scholar 67 (Winter 1998), 91.

8.同上,第 103 页

8. Ibid., 103.

9.引自 Paul Gagnon,“历史在公民教育中的作用:政治智慧的前提”,载于 Walter C. Parker编,《培养民主思想》 (奥尔巴尼,1996 年),第 243 页。

9. Cited in Paul Gagnon, “History's Role in Civic Education: The Precondition for Political Intelligence” in Walter C. Parker, ed., Educating the Democratic Mind (Albany, 1996), 243.

10.请参阅 T. S. Hamerow 在《历史与历史学家反思录》麦迪逊,1987 年)中的精辟评论。

10. See the incisive comments by T. S. Hamerow in Reflections on History and Historians (Madison, 1987).

11. Carl N. Degler,“重塑美国历史”,美国历史杂志》 67(1980),24。

11. Carl N. Degler, “Remaking American History” Journal of American History 67 (1980), 24.

12.参见第 3 章有关所有使用的原始文件的副本,请参阅 Samuel S. Wineburg,“历史问题解决:评估文献和图片证据时使用的认知过程研究”,教育心理学杂志》 83 (1991),73–87。“Derek”与其他参与者的名字一样,是一个化名。

12. See Chapter 3. For copies of all the original documents used, see Samuel S. Wineburg, “Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence” Journal of Educational Psychology 83 (1991), 73–87. “Derek” like other participant's names, is a pseudonym.

13.同上,第 79 页

13. Ibid., 79.

14.布拉德利学校历史委员会,《构建历史课程:学校历史教学指南》华盛顿特区,1988 年)。

14. Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools (Washington, D.C., 1988).

15. Adam Hirsch,“十七世纪新英格兰军事文化的碰撞”,美国历史杂志》 74(1988),1187-1212。

15. Adam Hirsch, “The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England” Journal of American History 74 (1988), 1187–1212.

16.所罗门·斯托达德于 1703 年 10 月 22 日写给约瑟夫·达德利的信,引自赫希的《碰撞》1208。

16. Solomon Stoddard writing to Joseph Dudley, October 22, 1703, cited in Hirsch, “Collision” 1208.

17. Allan Megill,“重述过去:史学中的‘描述’、解释和叙事”,美国历史评论》 94(1989),632。

17. Allan Megill, “Recounting the Past: ‘Description,’ Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography” American Historical Review 94 (1989), 632.

18.参见汉斯-格奥尔格·伽达默尔,《历史意识问题》,载于保罗·拉比诺和威廉·M·沙利文编,《解释性社会科学》(伯克利,1979 年)。

18. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness” in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretative Social Science (Berkeley, 1979).

19. Robin G. Collingwood,《历史的观念》牛津,1946 年),第 215 页。

19. Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 215.

20. Jonathan Kandell,“世界是由奶酪制成的吗?Carlo Ginzburg 对其他人忽略的问题很感兴趣”,纽约时报杂志》(1991 年 11 月 17 日),第 47 页。

20. Jonathan Kandell, “Was the World Made Out of Cheese? Carlo Ginzburg Is Fascinated by Questions That Others Ignore” New York Times Magazine (November 17, 1991), 47.

21. Robert Darnton,《猫科动物大屠杀》(纽约,1985 年),第 4 页

21. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York, 1985), 4.

22. Richard White,追忆阿哈纳格兰:一个家庭的过去的故事》(纽约,1998 年),第 13 页。

22. Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York, 1998), 13.

23. Louis O. Mink,历史理解》(伊萨卡,1987 年),第 103 页。

23. Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding (Ithaca, 1987), 103.

24.同上

24. Ibid.

25.大卫·洛文塔尔,《过去是一个异国他乡》英国剑桥,1985 年)。

25. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, England, 1985).

26.德格勒的引言出现在书封上:劳雷尔·撒切尔·乌尔里希,《助产士的故事:玛莎·巴拉德的生平,根据她的日记,1785-1812》纽约,1990 年)。

26. The quotation from Degler appears on the book jacket: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York, 1990).

27.本次研讨会由兰迪·申卡特(Randy Schenkat)构思,并与密歇根州立大学生物教学专家凯西·罗斯(Kathy Roth)教授合作授课。研讨会的目的是模拟一种跨学科方法,该方法既能整合各方力量,又能保留两个不同学科各自独特的视角来审视共同的问题。参见罗斯教授对K-12阶段典型跨学科课程的批判性评论:“重新思考跨学科研究”,《美国教育家》 18(1994),44-48。

27. This workshop was the brainchild of Randy Schenkat and was taught collaboratively with Professor Kathy Roth of Michigan State University, a specialist in the teaching of biology. The workshop's intent was to model an interdisciplinary approach that joins forces while still maintaining the powerful lenses that two different disciplines bring to a common problem. See Roth's critique of the typical approach to interdisciplinary curricula in K-12 settings: “Second Thoughts about Interdisciplinary Studies” American Educator 18 (1994), 44–48.

28.罗兰·巴特,《历史话语》,载于迈克尔·莱恩编,《结构主义导论》纽约,1970 年),第 145-155 页。

28. Roland Barthes, “Historical Discourse” in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (New York, 1970), 145–55.

29. Avon Crismore,“教科书的修辞:元话语”, 《课程研究杂志》 16(1984),279-96。另见 Richard Paxton,“‘仿佛有人在写人生’:可见作者对高中历史学生的影响”,《教育心理学杂志》 89(1997),235-50。

29. Avon Crismore, “The Rhetoric of Textbooks: Metadiscourse” Journal of Curriculum Studies 16 (1984), 279–96. See also Richard Paxton, “'someone with Like a Life Wrote It': The Effects of a Visible Author on High School History Students” Journal of Educational Psychology 89 (1997), 235–50.

30.这本书由多人合著,乔丹是主要历史学家,还有两位合作者:温斯罗普·D·乔丹、米里亚姆·格林布拉特和约翰·S·鲍斯,《美国人:一个民族和一个国家的历史》(伊利诺伊州埃文斯顿,1985 年)。

30. The book is corporately authored, with Jordan as the main historian and two collaborators: Winthrop D. Jordan, Miriam Greenblatt, and John S. Bowes, The Americans: The History of a People and a Nation (Evanston, Ill., 1985).

31.同上,第 68 页

31. Ibid., 68.

32.乌尔里希,助产士的故事》,162。

32. Ulrich, Midwife's Tale, 162.

33.同上,第 251 页

33. Ibid., 251.

34.同上

34. Ibid.

35.同上,第 41 页

35. Ibid., 41.

36.同上,第9页

36. Ibid., 9.

37.参见彼得·诺维克,《那个高尚的梦想:客观性问题与美国历史学界(英国剑桥,1988 年)。

37. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question “and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, England, 1988)”.

38.英国航海家在 1550 年之后的某个时候到达了西非海岸。参见Winthrop D. Jordan,《白人胜过黑人:美国人对黑人的态度,1550–1812 年》(纽约,1968 年),第1 章。

38. English navigators reached the shores of West Africa sometime after 1550. See Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York, 1968), chap. 1.

39.参见本书第 4 章。我对这些问题的阐述得益于大卫·洛文塔尔的文章《永恒的过去:一些英美历史先入之见》(载《美国历史杂志》 75 (1989),1263–80)。另见罗纳德·T·高木的《不同的镜子:多元文化美国史》(波士顿,1993)。

39. See Chapter 4 of this volume. My framing of these questions is indebted to David Lowenthal's essay, “The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Preconceptions” Journal of American History 75 (1989), 1263–80. See also Ronald T. Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston, 1993).

4.0 .关于林肯的各种解读,参见梅里尔·彼得森的《美国记忆中的林肯》(纽约,1994年)。关于林肯种族观的简要论述,参见亚瑟·齐尔弗斯米特的《林肯与种族问题:十年解读》,亚伯拉罕·林肯协会论文集(伊利​​诺伊州斯普林菲尔德,1980年),第22-45页。关于20世纪60年代黑人权力运动鼎盛时期人们如何看待林肯的例子,参见小勒罗内·贝内特的《亚伯拉罕·林肯是白人至上主义者吗?》,载《黑檀》杂志第23期(1968年2月),第35-42页。

40. For an introduction to the ways Lincoln has been viewed, see Merrill Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York, 1994). For a concise statement on Lincoln's views on race see Arthur Zilversmit, Lincoln and the Problem of Race: A Decade of Interpretations, Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association (Springfield, Ill., 1980), 22–45. For an example of how Lincoln was viewed during the height of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, see Lerone Bennett, Jr., “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Ebony 23 (February 1968), 35–42.

41.我在这项练习中将林肯置于他的同时代人之中的灵感来自乔治·M·弗雷德里克森的《白人思想中的黑人形象(纽约,1971 年)。

41. My inspiration for situating Lincoln among his contemporaries in this exercise came from George M. Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind (New York, 1971).

42.平心而论,这位学生在阅读此书方面并非孤例。理查德·霍夫施塔特在其著作《美国政治传统及其缔造者》(纽约,1948年)中质疑林肯的思想是否“如同一个四分五裂的家庭”。无论如何,我们很容易从中看出,这一切都是一个职业政客为了拉选票而采取的手段(第116页)。

42. To be fair, this student is in esteemed company in this reading. In The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made it (New York, 1948), Richard Hofstadter wondered whether Lincoln's mind was “a house divided against itself. In any case it is easy to see in all this the behavior of a professional politician looking for votes” (p. 116).

43.有关文件的副本,请参阅第 4 章。有关方法完整描述,请参阅 Sam Wineburg,“阅读亚伯拉罕·林肯:历史文本解释的专家研究”,《认知科学》 22 (1998),319–46。

43. See Chapter 4 for copies of the documents. For a full description of the methodology, see Sam Wineburg, “Reading Abraham Lincoln: An Expert-Expert Study in the Interpretation of Historical Texts” Cognitive Science 22 (1998), 319–46.

44. Richard M. Weaver,《修辞伦理学》芝加哥,1953 年)。

44. Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago, 1953).

45.关于这一点,尤其参见昆汀·斯金纳的《思想史中的意义与理解》,载历史与理论》 8(1969),第3-53页。

45. On this point see, in particular, Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” History and Theory 8 (1969), 3–53.

46.普里莫·莱维,《溺亡者与获救者》纽约,1989 年),150-151 页。

46. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 1989), 150–51.

47.同上

47. Ibid.

48.同上,第 151 页

48. Ibid., 151.

49.马可·波罗,《游记》(英国萨福克,1958 年),第 253 页。感谢Mike Bryant 指出这段文字。

49. Marco Polo, The Travels (Suffolk, England, 1958), 253. Thanks to Mike Bryant for pointing this passage out.

2

2

历史教学与学习心理学

The Psychology of Teaching and Learning History

提出研究历史最令人信服的理由的,并非历史学家,而是一位政治家。在基督诞生近一个世纪前,西塞罗在罗马元老院发表讲话时宣称:“不了解出生之前发生的事情,就如同孩童一般。”自二十世纪初以来,学者们一直试图理解学习和教授历史的独特之处和挑战。然而,很多时候,那些探究这些问题的人对前人的努力知之甚少,如同孩童般贸然涉足那些需要历史背景支撑的问题。

It was a politician, not a historian, who offered the most persuasive rationale for studying history. Addressing the Roman Senate nearly a century before the birth of Christ, Cicero proclaimed, “Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.” Since the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars have tried to understand the unique features and challenges of learning and teaching history. Too often those who inquire into these questions have little awareness of the efforts of their predecessors, venturing childlike into issues that would benefit from a historical mooring.

本文旨在通过考察学者们研究历史学习与教学的方式,来弥补这一困境。¹大部分此类研究都是由心理学家进行的,无论好坏(通常情况下坏的)。即使历史学家或具有历史思维的哲学家尝试进行实证研究,他们的方法也带有心理学研究及其核心假设的印记。²未来关于历史学习与教学的研究或许能够超越这种心理学传统,但即便如此,它仍然需要面对其历史遗留问题。因此,理解这一历史遗留问题对于构建未来研究路径至关重要。

My goal here is to redress this predicament by examining the ways in which scholars have studied the learning and teaching of history.1 Most of this research has been conducted, for better or worse (and often it is for worse), by psychologists. Even when historians or historically minded philosophers try their hand at conducting empirical studies, their approach bears the imprint of psychological research and its core assumptions.2 Future research on learning and teaching history may indeed grow beyond this psychological legacy, but in so doing it will still have to contend with its past. Understanding this legacy thus becomes central in creating a path to future inquiries.

将心理学对历史的研究视为一个统一的整体,就如同初学者在一项著名的物理学专业知识研究中犯的错误一样:他们倾向于根据表面相似性而非深层差异来归类。结构。3实际上,这里描述的研究与其说是基于共同的概念焦点,不如说是基于数据库中的共同关键词而联系在一起。历史研究可以被视为莎士比亚玫瑰的对立面。尽管“历史”一词出现在所有这些报告中,但它很少指代同一件事。对研究者而言,历史理解可以意味着任何事情,从记忆一系列日期到掌握一套逻辑关系,从能够复述一个公认的故事到应对难以用单一解释来概括的模糊问题。这些历史以及以这些历史名义进行的实证研究,既反映了研究者自身的情况,也反映了参与其中的儿童和教师的情况。从这个意义上讲,心理学对历史的研究本身就构成了一部引人入胜的历史记录,一个形式多样的图景,证明了对过去的研究可以有多种不同的理解方式。

To view the body of psychological work on history as a cohesive undertaking would be to commit the error of novices in a famous study of expertise in physics: the tendency to group elements by surface similarity, not by deep structure.3 In reality, the studies described here are united more by common keywords in data bases than by a shared conceptual focus. Research on history may be thought of as the counterpoint to Shakespeare's rose. Though the word “history” appears in all these reports, it rarely describes the same thing. To researchers, historical understanding can mean anything from memorizing a list of dates to mastering a set of logical relations, from being able to recite an agreed-upon story to contending with ill-defined problems resistant to single interpretations. These histories and the empirical studies done in their name tell as much about the researchers who conducted them as about the children and teachers who participated in them. In this sense, the body of psychological research on history constitutes an intriguing historical record in its own right, a landscape of mixed forms that attests to the multiplicity of ways in which the study of the past can be understood.

我的文章分为三个部分。首先,我探讨了早期美国心理学家对历史的研究。这项工作的成就与不足,以及它所实现或未能实现的目标,都揭示了我们当下的诸多境况。第二部分,我考察了英国的研究。尽管这项工作可以追溯到二十世纪初,但我将从秉持皮亚杰传统的英国心理学家的研究项目入手。在最后一部分,我回顾了随着行为主义的衰落和认知学习方法的兴起而出现的当代研究项目。

My story is organized into three sections. First, I discuss the treatment of history by early psychologists working in the United States. The accomplishments and shortcomings of this work, the goals it achieved or left unfulfilled, disclose much about our present condition. In the second section I examine research conducted in Great Britain. Although this work goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, I pick up the story with the research programs of British psychologists working in the Piagetian tradition.4 In the final section I review contemporary research programs that have arisen with the collapse of behaviorism and the ascension of cognitive approaches to learning.

历史研究:一些早期调查

RESEARCH ON HISTORY: SOME EARLY INVESTIGATIONS

对于教育心理学的创始人而言,历史更多的是一个理论而非实证研究的主题。在爱德华·L·桑代克的442页著作《教育心理学简明教程》中,除了提及历史成就中的性别差异(男孩更胜一筹)之外,几乎没有提及历史。⁵只有《教育:入门读物》中,历史才得到了更深入的探讨。桑代克在此停下来思考他那个时代一个迫切的问题:历史应该“倒叙”教授,即从现在开始追溯历史事件,还是传统的按时间顺序叙述更适合青少年的能力和性格?尽管缺乏数据支持,桑代克却对答案深信不疑:

For the founders of educational psychology, history was more a topic of theoretical than empirical concern. In the 442 pages of Edward L. Thorndike's Educational Psychology—Briefer Course, history goes unmentioned save for a single reference to sex differences in historical achievement (which favored boys).5 Only in Education: A First Book does history receive more than fleeting attention. Here Thorndike paused to speculate on the burning question of his day: Should history be taught “backward” that is, beginning with the present and tracing events back in time, or was the traditional chronological treatment better suited to the abilities and dispositions of youngsters? Despite the absence of data, Thorndike was certain of the answer:

探究事物存在的原因,以及这些原因的原因,其教育价值远远高于基于已知记录进行解释而产生的谬误推理……因此,按时间倒序排列历史进程……值得认真考虑。6

The educational value of finding the causes of what is, and then the causes of these causes, is so very much superior to the spurious reasoning which comes from explaining a record already known…that the arrangement of the…course in history in the inverse temporal order…deserves serious consideration.6

斯坦利·霍尔是当时首屈一指的发展心理学家,他与桑代克一样,对历史教学抱有浓厚的兴趣。鉴于霍尔关注人格发展,他将历史研究视为一种工具,帮助学生将事件置于“成长与发展的产物”的时间视角下进行理解,这并不令人意外。霍尔认为,历史,尤其是在青少年时期,应该融入“最大程度激发社会服务和无私奉献精神”的教诲。 7在霍尔看来,历史并非相互竞争的解读战场,也并非错综复杂的问题,甚至也不是培养批判性思维的场所,而是一种统一的道德力量,“一部充满鼓舞人心的伦理典范的宝库,展现了每个人最终如何得到应有的报应。” 8

G. Stanley Hall, the premier developmental psychologist of his day, shared Thorndike's speculative interest in history teaching. Given Hall's concern with the development of character, it is not surprising that he saw in historical study a tool for helping students place events in a “temporal perspective as products of growth and development” a subject that, especially during adolescence, should be infused with lessons that “inspire to the greatest degree ideals of social service and unselfishness.”7 Not a battleground of competing interpretations, a tangle of ill-defined problems, or even a site for the development of critical thinking, Hall's history would be a unifying moral force, “a thesaurus of inspiring ethical examples to show how all got their deserts in the end.”8

在早期教育心理学家中,芝加哥的查尔斯·哈伯德·贾德对历史进行了深刻的探讨。贾德在《高中学科心理学》一书中撰写的章节内容丰富,令人印象深刻,仅用二十九页就涵盖了时间顺序思维的本质、因果判断的困难(历史中的因果判断“远比科学中复杂得多”)、戏剧性重演的危险性、历史证据带来的心理难题,以及社会史(当时称为“工业史”)的激励作用。9 贾德的论述借鉴了包括七人委员会 10和五人委员会 11在内的其他学者的研究成果,同时也展现了其独到的见解。在题为“道德判断的复杂性”的章节中,贾德探讨了当下主义在心理上的必然性,以及理解过去本身的难度——或许甚至是不可能性:

Among early educational psychologists, Chicago's Charles Hubbard Judd dealt incisively with history. Judd's chapter in the Psychology of High-School Subjects was a treatment impressive in scope, embracing in twenty-nine pages the nature of chronological thinking, the difficulties of causal judgment (“much more complicated” in history than in science), the dangers of dramatic reenactments, the psychological difficulties presented by historical evidence, and the motivational role of social (then called “industrial”) history.9 While drawing on the work of others, including the Committee of Seven10 and the Committee of Five,11 Judd's discussion contains its own flourishes of insight. In a section entitled “The Intricacy of Moral Judgments,” Judd dealt with the psychological inevitability of presentism, the difficulty—perhaps even the impossibility—of understanding the past on its own terms:

现代学生的所有判断都受到其所处时代特有的既定思维模式的指导。我们有一些观念,这些观念与英国与其美洲殖民地发生争端时期的观念截然不同。当学生在历史研究中突然回到与当前情境完全不同的情境时,他很可能在未充分意识到自身方法谬误的情况下,将构成其当前遗产的判断标准和伦理思想准则带回过去

The modern student is…guided in all of his judgments by an established mode of thought…peculiar to his own generation. We have certain notions…that are wholly different from the notions that obtained at the time that England was in controversy with her American colonies. When…[the student] is suddenly carried back in his historical studies to situations that differ altogether from the situations that now confront him, he is likely to carry back, without being fully aware of the fallacy of his procedure, those standards of judgment and canons of ethical thought which constitute his present inheritance.12

在这段简短的评论中,贾德预见了在二十世纪最后几十年里,研究人员将一直关注的问题。

In this short comment Judd anticipated issues that would occupy researcher's attention well into the final decades of the twentieth century.

1917年,美国加入第一次世界大战的那一年,历史首次出现在创刊十年的《教育心理学杂志》上。杂志的执行主编、布鲁克林教师培训学校的教授J·卡尔顿·贝尔(J. Carleton Bell )在其任期伊始发表了一篇题为《历史感》(The Historic Sense)的社论(随后发表的第二篇社论则探讨了心理学与军事问题的关系)。贝尔认为,历史研究为思考和反思提供了契机,这与他所说的许多教学实践截然相反。然而,对于那些立志追求这些崇高目标的教师,贝尔提出了两个问题:“什么是历史感?”以及“如何培养历史感?” 13他继续说道,这些问题并非历史教师独有,而是“教育心理学家所关注的,也是他有责任尝试解答的问题。” 14 贝尔为如何找到“历史感”提供了一些线索。面对一套原始文献,一位学生能够条理清晰地叙述,而另一位学生却只能拼凑出“一堆杂乱无章的事实”。 15造成这种差异的原因和思维方式是什么?同样,一些大学新生“在整理历史资料方面表现出极强的技巧”,而另一些学生“对所有陈述都给予同等的重视……结果却在繁杂的细节中彻底迷失”。 16贝尔不禁思考,这些发现反映的是“历史能力的先天差异”,还是“特定训练课程的效果”?这些问题为新兴的教育心理学领域开辟了“一个引人入胜的研究领域”。 17

In 1917, the year the United States entered World War I, history made it into the pages of the ten-year-old Journal of Educational Psychology. J. Carleton Bell, managing editor of the Journal and professor at the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers, began his tenure with an editorial entitled “The Historic Sense” (A timely second editorial examined the relationship of psychology to military problems.) Bell argued that the study of history provided an opportunity for thinking and reflection, the opposite of what he claimed went on in much instruction. However, to teachers who would aim at these lofty goals, Bell put two questions: “What is the historic sense?” and “How can it be developed?”13 Such questions, he continued, did not concern the history teacher alone but were ones “in which the educational psychologist is interested, and which it is incumbent upon him to attempt to answer.”14 Bell offered clues about where to locate the “historic sense.” Presented with a set of primary documents, one student produces a coherent account while another assembles “a hodgepodge of miscellaneous facts.”15 What factors and ways of thought account for this discrepancy? Similarly, some college freshmen “show great skill in the orderly arrangement of their historical data” while others “take all statements with equal emphasis…and become hopelessly confused in the multiplicity of details.”16 Do such findings reflect “native differences in historic ability,” Bell wondered, or are they the “effects of specific courses of training”? Such questions opened up “a fascinating field for investigation” for the new field of educational psychology.17

贝尔提出的这些问题至今仍困扰着我们:历史理解的本质是什么?在有多个正确答案的任务中,什么决定了成功?教学在提升学生的思维能力方面可以发挥什么作用?鉴于这一前瞻性的研究议程,审视其在实践中的展开情况令人深思。在与社论相呼应的一篇文章中,贝尔和他的同事大卫·F·麦科勒姆发表了一项实证研究,该研究首先概述了评估历史理解的各种方法:18

Bell put his finger on questions that continue to occupy us today: What is the essence of historical understanding? What determines success on tasks that have more than one right answer? What role might instruction play in improving student's ability to think? Given this forward-looking research agenda, it is sobering to examine how it unfolded in practice. In a companion piece to his editorial, Bell and his associate David F. McCollum presented an empirical study that began by sketching out the various ways historical understanding might be assessed:18

1. “[T]能够根据过去的情况来理解现在的事件。” 19

1. “[T]he ability to understand present events in light of the past.”19

2.能够梳理文献记录——报纸报道、传闻、党派攻击、当时的记述——并从中构建出“一个清晰且合理的事件叙述”。这一点尤为重要,因为这是许多“优秀且认真的大学历史教师”的目标。20

2. The ability to sift through the documentary record—newspaper accounts, hearsay, partisan attacks, contemporary accounts—and construct “from this confused tangle a straightforward and probable account” of what happened. This is important, especially, because it is the goal of many “able and earnest college teachers of history.”20

3.欣赏历史叙事的能力。

3. The ability to appreciate a historical narrative.

4. “对特定历史情境下的‘思考问题’做出反思性和辨别性的回答。” 21

4. “[R]eflective and discriminating replies to ‘thought question’ on a given historical situation.”21

5.能够回答有关历史人物和事件的事实性问题。

5. The ability to answer factual questions about historical personalities and events.

贝尔和麦科勒姆承认,最后一个方面是“最狭隘的,在某些学者看来也是最不重要的历史能力”,但出乎意料的是,它却是“最容易检验的”。 22两位作者果断宣布,回答事实性问题的能力“被选为本次研究的主题”。 23虽然这或许是首例,但绝非最后一例,在很多情况下,易于衡量而非对主题理解的优先性决定了研究方案的框架。

Bell and McCollum conceded that this last aspect was “the narrowest, and in the estimation of some writers, the least important type of historical ability” but it was, fatefully, the one “most readily tested.”22 In a decisive move, the authors announced that the ability to answer factual questions was “chosen for study in the present investigation.”23 While perhaps the first instance, this was not to be the last in which ease of measurement, not priority of subject matter understanding, determined the contours of a research program.

贝尔和麦科勒姆设计了一份测试题,内容包括人名(例如,约翰·伯戈因、亚历山大·汉密尔顿、赛勒斯·H·麦考密克)、日期(例如,1492年、1776年、1861年)和事件(例如,《谢尔曼反垄断法》、《逃奴法》、德雷德·斯科特案判决),这些都是教师认为每个学生都应该掌握的重要事实。他们对1500名学生进行了测试,这些学生分别来自小学高年级(五至七年级)、中学和大学。在小学高年级,学生答对了16%的问题;在中学(学习了一年美国历史后),答对了33%的问题;在大学(第三次接触历史后),答对了49%的问题。贝尔和麦科勒姆采取了通常只有乡村牧师,以及近年来教育部长和专栏作家才会采取的立场,他们谴责了教育系统及其所作所为:“对于美国历史上最简单、最显而易见的事实,100分中只得33分,这绝对不是任何一所高中可以引以为豪的成绩。” 24

Bell and McCollum composed a test of names (e.g., John Burgoyne, Alexander Hamilton, Cyrus H. McCormick), dates (e.g., 1492, 1776, 1861), and events (e.g., the Sherman Antitrust Law, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Dred Scott decision) believed by teachers to be important facts every student should know. They gave their test to 1,500 students at the upper elementary (fifth through seventh grades), secondary, and college levels. In the upper elementary grades, students answered 16 percent of the questions correctly; in high school (after a year of U.S. history), 33 percent; and in college, after a third exposure to history, 49 percent. Taking a stand customarily reserved for country preachers, and more recently for secretaries of education and op-ed columnists, Bell and McCollum indicted the educational system and its charges: “Surely a grade of 33 in 100 on the simplest and most obvious facts of American history is not a record in which any high school can take pride.”24

六年后的1923年,D. H. Eikenberry以较小的规模重复了这些发现。25他发现,34名大学高年级学生中,没有一个人能记住美墨战争期间的美国总统(詹姆斯·K·波尔克),而能记住南方邦联总统(杰斐逊·戴维斯)的人不到一半。20世纪40年代, 《纽约时报》对7000名学生的历史知识进行了一项调查,结果也呈现出类似的模式。根据美国国家教育进步评估(NAEP)美国历史考试的最新结果,这种情况自那时以来几乎没有改变。 26从历史的角度来看,这些近期结果几乎没有提供任何证据来支持一些人所声称的“文化记忆的逐渐瓦解”。 27 相反,这些结果的一致性印证了美国一种奇特的消遣:每一代人都热衷于测试年轻人,结果却发现——并且再次发现——他们“可耻的”无知。 28但正如戴尔·惠廷顿所指出的,将二十世纪初的测试结果与最新的研究结果进行比较,我们发现,尽管本世纪高中入学人数大幅增长, 29但学生的历史知识并没有随着时间的推移发生显著变化。如果说有什么意义的话,那就是这些结果的一致性让人对所谓“知识记忆黄金时代”的说法产生了怀疑。对这样一个时代的诉求,与其说是对国家历史的引用(而国家历史的真实性可以从文献记录中得到证实),不如说是国家传说和对一个从未存在过的时代的怅然怀旧。

Six years later, in 1923, D. H. Eikenberry replicated these findings, though on a smaller scale.25 He found that not one of thirty-four university seniors could remember who was president during the Mexican War (James K. Polk), and fewer than half could remember the president of the Confederacy (Jefferson Davis). Similar patterns emerged from a New York Times survey of historical knowledge given to 7,000 students in the 1940s, and little has changed since then, according to contemporary findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress examination in American history.26 Viewed in historical perspective, these recent results provide scant evidence for what some have claimed is a “gradual disintegration of cultural memory.”27 Instead, the consistency of these results testifies to a peculiar American pastime: the practice by each generation of testing its young, only to discover—and rediscover—their “shameful” ignorance.28 But as Dale Whittington has shown, when test results from the early part of the twentieth century are compared with the most recent findings, we learn that there has been little appreciable change in student's historical knowledge over time,29 despite the enormous expansion of high school enrollments in this century. If anything, the consistency of these results casts doubt on a presumed golden age of fact retention. Appeals to such an age are more the stuff of national lore and a wistful nostalgia for a time that never was than a reference to national history whose reality can be found in the documentary record.

卡尔顿·贝尔在布鲁克林师范学校的同事加里·C·迈尔斯则另辟蹊径,探索历史知识。迈尔斯对学生的错误答案比正确答案更感兴趣。30他让107名女大学生分别说出50位历史人物的一个事实。他发现,只有不到50%的人名被准确回忆起来,其中40%的人名“在掌握和回忆之间丢失了”。 31但这种丢失并非彻底抹杀。迈尔斯发现,错误的答案往往是将事实错误地联系起来,这是遵循某种可辨识模式的系统性努力的结果。 32 例如,菲利普·约翰·斯凯勒是美国独立战争期间国会任命的四位少将之一,他参与了从法国印第安战争到南北战争的一系列战争,但他的将军身份却始终未变。像废奴主义者威廉·劳埃德·加里森这样的名字,经常与发音相似的名字混淆,比如威廉·亨利·哈里森总统。而像收割机发明者赛勒斯·麦考密克这样姓氏常见的人,却容易与同名者混淆,例如20世纪20年代风靡一时的爱尔兰民谣歌手约翰·麦考马克。迈尔斯预见到未来研究者会对错误分析的关注,他敦促道:“错误的答案值得更仔细的研究,而且与传统的正确答案研究相比,它或许能为教师提供更多更好的教学信息。” 33

J. Carleton Bell's colleague at the Brooklyn Training School, Garry C. Myers, took a different route in exploring historical knowledge. Myers was more interested in student's wrong answers than in their correct ones.30 He asked 107 college women to name one fact about each of fifty historical figures. He found that fewer than 50 percent of the names were recalled accurately, with 40 percent “lost between the time of mastery and that of recall.”31 But this loss was not an erasure. Wrong answers, Myers found, were often statements of facts wrongly connected, the result of systematic efforts that followed a discernible pattern.32 For example, Philip John Schuyler, one of four major generals commissioned by Congress during the Revolutionary War, was connected to wars ranging from the French and Indian War to the Civil War, but his status as general remained unchanged. Names like that of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison were confused with names that sounded similar, like President William Henry Harrison. And people with common last names, like Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper, were confused with others bearing a homonymous name, in this case John McCormack, the Irish crooner whose ballads were popular in the twenties. “Wrong answers deserve more careful study” urged Myers, anticipating future researcher's concern with error analysis, “and may give the teacher more and better information about his teaching than can be obtained from the traditional study of correct answers.”33

迈耶的研究难以简单归类。一方面,他对人类“对某种情境做出某种反应”这一倾向的认识,预示了大约十五年后英国社会心理学家弗朗西斯·巴特利特爵士提出的“意义追寻”理论。 34 另一方面,他这与德国心理学家赫尔曼·艾宾豪斯的联想主义不谋而合。艾宾豪斯曾告诫教师要“格外谨慎……确保正确复述”,以便学习者“将知识的每个要素与其对应的要素永远联系起来”。 35但迈尔斯所设想的复述并非机械的练习。相反,孩子们会在学习过程中“感知事实之间的正确关系”,利用“连接点”,也就是记忆中的“插槽”,这些“插槽”是学习者“需要时刻牢记的”。 36在这里,迈尔斯诉诸认知层级,将要点和次要点联系起来,这让人想起赫尔巴特早期的传统,并预示了后来由大卫·奥苏贝尔和其他认知革命先驱推广的认知组织者概念。 37

Myer's study resists easy classification. On one hand, his recognition of the human tendency to “make some kind of response to a situation” foreshadowed the British social psychologist Sir Francis Bartlett's “effort after meaning” some fifteen years later.34 On the other hand, he struck a chord that resonated with the associationism of the German psychologist Herman Ebbinhaus when he warned teachers to “exercise the greatest care…to insure correct recitations” so that the learner keeps “each element of his knowledge eternally associated with his mate.”35 But the recitation Myers had in mind was not mindless drill. Rather, children would “perceive facts in proper relation during study” using “hitching posts, ”or slots in memory, that the learner “needs to keep constantly in view.”36 Here Myer's appeal to cognitive hierarchies with major and minor points recalled an earlier Herbartian tradition and anticipated later notions of cognitive organizers popularized by David Ausubel and other pioneers of the cognitive revolution.37

并非所有心理学家都像迈耶那样痴迷于错误答案,或者像贝尔那样重视历史感。当时担任《教育研究杂志》编辑、伊利诺伊大学教育学教授的R·白金汉对“事实知识测试忽略了历史认知最重要的方面”这种指责感到愤怒。他怒斥道:“对记忆的批判被大大夸大了。即使我们认为我们是在诉诸某种所谓的更高层次的认知过程,我们实际上可能只是在处理一种略微高级的记忆形式。” 38为了支持他的观点,白金汉让中小学生使用“范·瓦格宁历史信息与判断测试”中的题目,发现该测试中的事实题和“思考题”之间的相关性为0.4。 39白金汉并没有得出事实知识和历史推理密不可分的结论,而是提出了一个更大胆的论断:人们所谓的“历史推理”实际上只不过是对事实的了解!白金汉通过分析范·瓦格宁测试中的“思维项目”来论证他的观点:

Not all psychologists shared Myer's fascination with wrong answers, or Bell's with the historic sense. B. R. Buckingham, then editor of the Journal of Educational Research and professor of education at the University of Illinois, bristled in response to charges that tests of factual knowledge missed the most important aspects of historical knowing. “The case against memory has been vastly overstated” he fumed. “Even when we think we are appealing to a supposedly higher process, we may really be dealing only with a somewhat higher form of memory.”38 To support his claim, Buckingham administered questions from the “Van Wagenen Test of Historical Information and Judgment” to elementary and high school students and found a correlation of .4 between the factual items of this instrument and its “thought” items.39 Rather than concluding that factual knowledge and historical reasoning went hand-in-hand, Buckingham made a bolder claim: What people called “historical reasoning” was actually nothing more than knowledge of facts! Buckingham argued his case by analyzing the “thought items” on the Van Wagenen test:

第一个问题(思维量表上的问题)如下:“在汽船发明之前,人们通常乘坐帆船在海上航行。汽船是在欧洲人来到美洲定居很久很久之后才出现的。你认为这些早期的欧洲移民是如何来到美洲的?”正确答案是“乘坐帆船”,这是一个事实。因此,尽管问题以“你认为……”开头,但它仍然是一个事实性问题。40

The first [question on the Thought Scale] reads as follows: “Before the steamboats were made people used to travel on the ocean in sail boats. Steamboats were not made until a long, long time after the European people came to make their homes in America. How do you think these early European settlers came to America?” The acceptable answer is “in sail boats” and it is a fact. Therefore the question is a fact question although introduced by the words, “How do you think?”40

白金汉认为,无需进行任何其他检验,即可从范·瓦格宁量表的客观事实部分推断出更高层次的历史理解。 41此外,他声称,由于客观事实检验与更高层次的历史理解之间存在关联,因此,从范·瓦格宁量表的客观事实部分可以“相当准确地”推断出更高层次的历史理解。在历史认知能力方面,我们实际上在进行事实测试时“鼓励训练这些更高层次的能力” 。42

Buckingham believed that higher forms of historical understanding may be inferred from the factual component of the Van Wagenen scale “with substantial accuracy without giving any other test.”41 Moreover, he claimed, because of the relationship between factual tests and higher mental abilities in history, we actually “encour[age] the training of these higher abilities” when we administer tests of facts.42

白金汉的逻辑漏洞百出,他的同时代人也未能幸免。下一期《教育研究杂志》刊登了康涅狄格州斯坦福德市教育局长F· 坎普的一篇简短却尖锐的回应。坎普讽刺地称自己是“研究领域的普通人”,但“在历史教学方面却并非普通人”。 43 坎普质疑范·瓦格宁量表的有效性,尤其质疑其考察历史思维的能力。他作为一名历史教师的经验告诉他,完全可以设计一些问题来衡量学生深入思考历史的能力。例如:“假设尚普兰在1608年碰巧与莫霍克人(易洛魁人)结盟,那么1758年法国在纽约的战役结果可能会如何?”坎普认为,这类问题的答案依赖于事实知识,但学生在形成答案时,“必须审视、权衡并接受或拒绝事实;然后,他必须对事实进行整理。这需要严谨的思考。” 45

Buckingham's shaky logic did not escape his contemporaries. The next issue of the Journal of Educational Research carried a short but stinging response by F. S. Camp, superintendent of schools in Stamford, Connecticut, who wryly identified himself as a “member of the [research] laity” but “not of the laity so far as teaching history is concerned.”43 Camp questioned the validity of Van Wagenen's scale, and particularly its ability to tap historical thinking. His own experience as a history teacher told him that it was possible to construct questions that measured student's ability to think deeply in history. For example: “Suppose Champlain in 1608 had chanced to befriend the Mohawks (Iroquois). What would probably have been the results of the New York campaign of the French in 1758?”44 The answers to such questions, argued Camp, drew on factual knowledge, but the student, in formulating a response, “must examine, weigh and accept or reject facts; he must then organize them. And that requires staunch thinking.”45

坎普的担忧或许能说服其他历史教师,但似乎对试题开发者影响甚微。随着研究工作日益转向量表开发和完善,贝尔和麦科勒姆眼中如同菜单般丰富的历史知识,危险地趋向于只关注其中一项——回答有关历史人物和事件的事实性问题的能力。 46教育测量领域的进步也带来了对历史课堂传统评估方式(如论文写作)的某种抵触情绪。 47一项研究表明,论文写作不仅令学生“反感”,也令教师“反感”,因为“审查、批改和修改学生作业是教师最头疼的事情”。 48如果能够证明,写作作业除了费力之外,几乎没有任何益处呢?更糟糕的是,如果论文写作“弊大于利”呢? 49这正是F. R. Gorman和D. S. Morgan的观点,他们的研究在美国的三个历史课堂中进行

Camp's concerns, while perhaps persuasive to other history teachers, seemed to have little effect on test developers. As research efforts turned increasingly to scale development and refinement, historical knowledge, viewed as a menu of possibilities by Bell and McCollum, narrowed perilously toward a concentration on just one of their entrees—the ability to answer factual questions about historical personalities and events.46 Advances in the field of educational measurement carried with them a certain antipathy to traditional forms of assessment in history classes, like essay writing.47 According to one study, essays were “distasteful” not only to students but also to teachers, because the “scrutinizing, marking, and correcting of the student products is the teacher's greatest bugbear.”48 What if it could be shown that written work, in addition to being laborious, produced little benefit? Worse, what if the essay produced “as much harm as it does good?”49 This was precisely the claim of F. R. Gorman and D. S. Morgan, whose study was conducted in three U.S. history classrooms.

这些班级均由同一位老师授课,但布置的书面作业量各不相同。一年级布置了“三个单元”,二年级布置了“一个单元”,而三年级则没有作业。三年级在事实性结果指标上的确表现最佳(181分,一年级为175分),但作者未能考虑到学生入学成绩水平的巨大差异。此外,研究者布置的作业与其说是作业,不如说更像是布置一些无意义的练习。要求学生认真思考并写下答案(例如,“列出林肯内阁成员及其职务”或“按顺序列出脱离联邦的州及其脱离日期”)。 50当戈尔曼和摩根得出结论:“教师们喜欢布置书面作业可能是因为他们把繁琐的作业与有效的学习方法混淆了”, 51不禁让人疑惑,这种混淆究竟出在哪里:是糊涂的教师,还是一心想证明书面作业无效的狂热研究人员?

These classes, all taught by the same teacher, were assigned different amounts of written homework. Class I was assigned “three units,” Class II “one unit,” and Class III none at all. Class III indeed did best on the factual outcome measure (181 points versus 175 for Class I), but the authors failed to account for the wide disparity in the entering achievement levels among students. Moreover, the researcher's homework assignments often looked more like directions for busy work than requests for thoughtful written responses (e.g., “List Lincoln's cabinet with the offices held by each” or “List the states which seceded in order, with the dates of secession”).50 When Gorman and Morgan concluded that “the popularity of written work with teachers may result from a confusion of busy work with valid learning procedures,”51 one wonders where the confusion truly lay: with muddled teachers or with zealous researchers hell-bent on demonstrating the ineffectiveness of written assignments?

心理测量学的进步推动了客观测试的发展,两次世界大战期间席卷美国学校的泰勒制精神也起到了推波助澜的作用。52但若将对“客观”测试的关注仅仅视为教育领域的运动,那就大错特错了。基于事实的历史知识观与历史学科中盛行的知识观不谋而合。当教育心理学家致力于构建可靠且客观的历史量表时,大学历史学家则试图摆脱人文主义的束缚,成为像人们常说的“为了一个逗号而跨越重洋”的科学家。 53正如彼得·诺维克所论证的那样,这种坚持事实主义的方法有助于将专业历史学家与业余同行区分开来,而这种区分对于历史学成为学术共同体中不可或缺的一员至关重要。54因此,几乎在同一时间,L. W. Sackett 在《教育心理学杂志》上发表了他对世界历史评分标准的改进,该标准旨在“几乎消除历史评分中的主观因素”,55而《美国历史评论》的编辑方针也正在制定中,旨在排除“观点性问题”,转而关注“能够以某种方式确定的事实问题”。56是一个学校与学院之间并非存在隔阂,而是紧密交织的时代。

Advances in psychometrics fueled the movement toward objective testing, as did the spirit of Taylorism that swept American schools between the world wars.52 But it would be wrong to see the focus on “objective” testing as a movement restricted to education. The fact-based image of historical knowledge fit cozily with prevailing views of knowledge in the discipline of history. As educational psychologists worked to produce reliable and objective history scales, university historians tried to extricate themselves from their humanistic roots so as to emerge as scientists who would, as the saying went, “cross an ocean to verify a comma.”53 This doggedly factualist approach, as Peter Novick has argued, helped distinguish professional historians from their amateur colleagues, a distinction necessary if history was to become a full-fledged member of the academic community.54 It is no coincidence, then, that at almost the same time that L. W. Sackett was presenting his refinement of a world history scale in the pages of the Journal of Educational Psychology, a scale that would “nearly eliminate the subjective factor in grading history,”55 the American Historical Review's editorial policy was being formulated to exclude from its pages “matters of opinion” in favor of “matters of fact capable of determination one way or another.”56 This was an age characterized not by a breach between school and academy, but by a tightly woven nexus.

第一次世界大战后,随着行为主义成为美国心理学家的主导研究范式,J·卡尔顿·贝尔或F· 坎普等人的关注点几乎被完全抛弃。 57即使在少数涉及历史的研究中,其关注点也鲜少偏离如何分配事实以便于记忆。58查尔斯·贾德早期对历史独特心理特征的关注被适用于所有领域的宏大学习理论所掩盖。直到20世纪70年代,心理学家罗伯特·加涅仍然可以轻率地宣称学习并非学科独有,并且“此类概念没有任何合理的理性基础”。除非是学校一天或一个学期内分配给这些科目的时间划分,否则不应称之为“数学学习”、“科学学习”、“语言学习”或“历史学习”。59直到十年后,这一观点才在主流学习心理学家中受到严峻挑战。

Following World War I, with the ascent of behaviorism as the dominant research paradigm of American psychologists, the concerns of a J. Carleton Bell or an F. S. Camp were all but abandoned.57 Even in the odd study that took up history, the focus rarely veered from how to apportion facts so that they could be easily committed to memory.58 The earlier concerns of Charles Judd with history's distinctive psychological features were overshadowed by sweeping learning theories that applied equally to all domains. Well into the 1970s, the psychologist Robert Gagné could blithely claim that learning was not unique to subject matter and that there was “no sound rational basis for such entities as ‘mathematics learning,’ ‘cience learning,’ ‘language learning’ or ‘history learning,’ except as divisions of time devoted to these subjects during a school day or term.”59 Not until a decade later would this position meet serious challenges among mainstream psychologists of learning.

具有讽刺意味的是,贾德指出的一些历史学习特征可能恰恰导致了研究者对历史的忽视。历史学习中缺乏对正确答案的共识,使得结果的衡量变得复杂。如果研究者认为事实测试无关紧要,而学期论文(通常是大学历史理解的产物)又过于繁琐,那么他们就不得不面对创建全新衡量标准的艰巨任务。当然,其他因素也发挥了作用。社会研究在美国的兴起,由于其涵盖的学科在概念和认识论上的差异,给研究者带来了新的挑战。此外,与数学领域不同,数学领域拥有一个活跃的研究群体,由学科专家和课程专家组成,他们借鉴心理学理论并为其做出贡献;而社会研究教育者中却没有这样的群体。后者的研究通常是单向的:他们借鉴心理学概念,却很少做出相应的贡献。这些因素——以及其他一些因素——导致了从第一次世界大战结束到认知革命到来这段时期,历史学习和教学研究相对被忽视。

Ironically, some of the features of history learning that Judd identified may have contributed to its neglect by researchers. The lack of consensus about right answers in history complicated the measurement of outcomes, for if researchers deemed tests of facts trivial and term papers (often the product of historical understanding at the college level) unwieldy, they were faced with the forbidding prospect of creating wholly new measures. Other factors doubtless came into play. The rise of social studies on American soil presented new challenges to researchers because of the conceptual and epistemological differences in the disciplines brought under its umbrella. Further, in contrast to mathematics, where an active research community of subject matter and curriculum experts borrowed from and contributed to psychological theorizing, there was no such group among social studies educators. Research conducted by this latter group was usually a one way street: Psychological concepts were borrowed, but little was offered in return. These factors—and doubtless others—contributed to a period of relative neglect in research on the learning and teaching of history from the end of World War I to the advent of the cognitive revolution.

英国的发展:皮亚杰、皮尔及其他

DEVELOPMENTS IN GREAT BRITAIN: PIAGET, PEEL, AND BEYOND

当美国研究人员专注于配对联想和迷宫实验时,英国心理学家则另辟蹊径。从20世纪50年代末到70年代,让·皮亚杰的理论为理解学校课程提供了框架。在1955年开始的28年间,英国至少发表了24篇从皮亚杰视角探讨历史学习的论文和学位论文。尽管近年来英国历史研究已涉足其他领域,但其发展仍离不开皮亚杰的理论根基。

While American researchers focused on paired associates and running rats through mazes, psychologists in Great Britain followed a different lead. From the late 1950s to well into the 1970s, the theories of Jean Piaget provided the framework for understanding the school curriculum. In a twenty-eight-year span beginning in 1955, no fewer than two dozen theses and dissertations on historical learning from a Piagetian perspective were produced in Great Britain.60 Although recent British work on history has ventured into different areas, it is impossible to conceive of it apart from its Piagetian roots.

在众多雄心勃勃的研究项目中,与英国心理学会前主席、伯明翰大学教育心理学教授E. A. Peel相关的项目尤为引人注目。Peel认为,皮亚杰的理论是理解儿童发展的关键。学校表现,是分类和系统化不同学科所需思维类型的一种方法。皮尔注意到皮亚杰的理论与数学和科学直接相关,于是着手将该理论扩展到儿童的文本推理,特别是他们对英语和历史书面材料的理解。皮尔认为,后一学科理解的本质不在于事实的罗列,而在于综合思维形式,例如把握“因果关系、理解连贯论证以及评估能力”。 61

Among the most ambitious research programs was that associated with E. A. Peel, a past president of the British Psychological Society and a professor of educational psychology at the University of Birmingham. For Peel, Piaget's theory was the key to understanding children's school performance, a means of classifying and systematizing the types of thinking required by different school subjects. Noting that Piaget's work had direct bearing on math and science, Peel set out to extend the theory to children's textual reasoning, particularly their comprehension of written materials in English and history. The essence of understanding in the latter subject, according to Peel, was not to be found in lists of facts but in synthetic forms of thought, like the ability to grasp “cause and effect, a capacity to follow a sustained argument and a power to evaluate.”61

尽管皮尔在其理论著作中经常提及历史,真正推动皮亚杰传统下的历史研究发展的却是他的学生罗伊·N·哈勒姆哈勒姆给一百名年龄在11岁到近17岁之间的英国高中生提供了三段教科书文章,分别关于玛丽·都铎、诺曼征服和爱尔兰内战,并就每段文章提出了一系列问题。例如,在阅读完关于诺曼征服的文章后,学生们被问及威廉摧毁英格兰北部是否正确。哈勒姆根据皮亚杰的智力发展阶段对学生的回答进行了分类。没有将问题与所提供的信息联系起来的回答被评为“前运算思维”;组织良好但未超出文本范围的回答被评为“具体运算思维”;而通过提出假设并与文本进行验证来超越文本范围的回答则被评为“形式运算思维”。

Although Peel often addressed history in his theoretical writings,62 it was his student, Roy N. Hallam,63 who gave historical research in the Piagetian tradition its biggest push. Hallam gave one hundred British high school students, ranging in age from eleven to nearly seventeen, three textbook passages, one on Mary Tudor, another on the Norman conquest, and the third on the civil wars in Ireland, as well as a series of questions on each. For example, after reading the passage about the Norman conquest, students were asked whether it was right for William to destroy northern England. Hallam classified student's responses according to Piagetian categories of intellectual development. Not relating the question to the information provided was scored as “preoperational thinking”; a well-organized answer that did not go beyond the text was classified as “concrete operational”; and going beyond the text by stating hypotheses and checking them against the text was rated “formal operational.”

在哈勒姆研究的一百名青少年中,只有两人始终能以最高水平——形式运算水平——回答问题。这些发现,以及皮尔其他同事的类似研究结果,使哈勒姆得出结论:系统性思维在历史领域出现得比在数学或科学领域晚。 64哈勒姆推测,这是因为历史让孩子面对的是一个“环境”,其中蕴含着生活在另一个世纪、有着与二十世纪截然不同的风俗习惯的成年人的内在动机。 65哈勒姆认为,历史的抽象性“甚至会让最聪明的成年人感到困惑”。 66

Of Hallam's one hundred adolescents, only two answered questions consistently at the highest level, that of formal operations. Such findings, and similar results from Peel's other colleagues, led Hallam to conclude that systematic thinking appeared later in history than in math or science.64 Hallam speculated that this is because history confronts the child with “an ‘environment’ which envelops the inner motives of adults living probably in another century with mores markedly different from those of the twentieth century.”65 The abstract nature of history, argued Hallam, “can perplex the most intelligent of adults.”66

跳出哈勒姆的研究框架,审视研究的构建和实施方式如何预先决定其结果,是很有意义的。首先,学生们被问到的问题与他们在课堂上学习的内容几乎没有关联。如果教学重点放在历史推理的形式方面,他们的表现会如何,仍然是个未知数。其次,学生们可能对哈勒姆的研究感到困惑。问题。67例如,考虑一下关于玛丽·都铎的文章旁边的问题:“玛丽·都铎认为上帝希望她带领英国重回天主教。(a)上帝会如何看待她的方法?(b)你能想到玛丽·都铎为什么要用这种方法让人们信奉她的宗教吗?” 68学生们究竟该如何回答这些问题呢?哈勒姆本人对他的研究结果毫不含糊:对于十四岁以下的孩子来说,历史“形式上不应该过于抽象,也不应该包含太多变量。” 69

It is useful to step back from Hallam's study to see how the ways in which research is framed and executed can predetermine its results. First, students were asked questions that had little connection to what they studied in class. How they might have performed had their instruction stressed the formal aspects of historical reasoning remained an open question. Second, students may have been confused by Hallam's questions.67 Consider, for example, the ones that accompanied the passage on Mary Tudor: “Mary Tudor thought that God wanted her to take England back to the Catholic church. (a) What would God have thought of her methods? (b) Can you think of any reasons why Mary Tudor should use such methods to make people follow her religion?”68 What on earth were students to answer in response? For his part, Hal- lam was anything but tentative about the meaning of his findings: History, for children younger than fourteen, “should not be too abstract in form, nor should it contain too many variables.”69

皮亚杰研究者们希望分离出历史学习中蕴含的基本心理过程,但这给他们带来了挑战。其中一个问题是如何最大限度地减少学生先验知识的影响,因为先验知识被认为会给实验结果引入不必要的变异。玛格丽特·F ·朱尔德试图通过编写关于三个虚构国家——阿扎、穆尔巴和诺查——的“历史”情景来解决这个问题。70学生看到一张图表,上面列出了其中两个虚构国家发生的平行事件,他们需要预测第三个国家将会发生什么。例如,在穆尔巴,“理查德在带领人民战胜入侵者后成为独裁者”,而在阿扎,亨利在父亲去世后成为国王。71随后学生们看到一份诺查历史上的五个事件清单,从军费开支的增加到生活水平的下降,并被要求使用来自阿扎和穆尔巴的对比数据,将这些事件按正确的顺序排列。朱尔德用皮亚杰的理论来解释学生的表现。成功的关键在于“识别……一个或多个变量以及它们之间可能存在的关系”。72只识别出一个变量且未对其进行分类的学生被判定为“前运算阶段”,而那些在保持其他变量不变的情况下协调多个变量的学生则被判定为展现出形式运算思维。

The desire to isolate the basic psychological processes embedded in learning history created challenges for Piagetian researchers. One problem was how to minimize the effects of student's prior knowledge, which was viewed as introducing unwanted variation to experimental results. Margaret F. Jurd tried to solve this problem by writing “historical” scenarios about three imaginary countries, Adza, Mulba, and Nocha.70 Students were presented with a chart showing parallel events in two of these made-up countries and had to predict what would happen in the third. In Mulba, for example, “Richard became dictator” after “having led his people to victory against invaders” while in Adza, Henry became king after his father's death.71 Students were then given a list of five events in Nocha's history, from a buildup in military spending to a decline in standard of living, and asked to order events in the correct sequence using comparative data from Adza and Mulba. Jurd interpreted student's performance in Piagetian terms. Success hinged on “identifying…one or more variables and the kinds of relations which might be thought to exist between them.”72 Students who identified only one variable and made no classification of it were judged “preoperational” while those who coordinated multiple variables while holding others constant were judged to be exhibiting formal operational thought.

Jurd、Hallam等人通过虚构国家或将历史信息限制在简短的教科书段落中,试图控制学生的先验知识。但在一个强调语境核心地位的领域,将历史事件脱离语境(或虚构历史)的做法显得有些奇怪。73经过皮亚杰的视角解读,历史推理变得类似于自然科学中教科书式的假设演绎推理,包括形式化的归纳和演绎技巧,以及变量协调和分类的策略。最终,这种对历史推理的描述比以往更能说服心理学家。在历史学家中。74这类研究中的历史被简化为一系列逻辑关系和假设检验,与该学科中常见的叙述、阐述和想象性重建的丰富混合体只有微弱的相似之处。

By creating imaginary countries or restricting historical information to short textbook passages, Jurd, Hallam, and others attempted to control for student's prior knowledge. But there was something odd about decontextualizing historical events (or inventing fictional history) in a field that stresses the centrality of context.73 Filtered through Piagetian lenses, historical reasoning came to resemble the textbook version of hypothetical-deductive reasoning in the natural sciences, complete with formalized techniques for induction and deduction and strategies for the coordination and classification of variables. The final result was a depiction of historical reasoning that was more persuasive among psychologists than among historians.74 Reduced to sets of logical relations and tests of hypotheses, the history in such studies bore only a faint resemblance to the rich hybrid of narration, exposition, and imaginative reconstruction familiar in the discipline.

人们很容易对那些试图剥离历史背景以探究历史认知的不切实际的努力提出批评。但这种批评不应掩盖这样一个事实:皮尔、哈勒姆、朱德等人是自J·卡尔顿·贝尔以来,首批重新审视“历史感”问题的心理学家。他们的努力提醒研究者,衡量历史推理能力的最佳指标并非儿童是否选择了正确答案,也并非仅仅是“对已学事实的简单重复”,而是儿童推理的本质、他们连接不同观点的能力以及他们为自己的结论提供的论证。尽管这些研究者可能在基于有限数据得出结论时有些夸大其词,但他们为该领域注入了新的活力,并启动了至今仍影响深远的研究项目,这一点值得肯定。

It is easy to find fault with quixotic efforts to strip away historical context to get at historical cognition. But such criticism should not obscure the fact that Peel, Hallam, Jurd, and others were the first psychologists since J. Carleton Bell to reopen the question of the “historic sense.” Their efforts reminded researchers that the best indication of historical reasoning was not children's selection of a right answer, the “mere repetition of learnt facts” but the nature of children's reasoning, their ability to connect ideas, and the justifications they offered for their conclusions.75 Although these researchers may have gone overboard in drawing conclusions based on limited data, they are to be credited with invigorating a field and launching projects whose influence is felt today.

皮亚杰历史学研究遗留的一个问题是其对实践的影响。英国南部地区考试委员会前秘书亨利·G·麦金托什认为,皮亚杰的研究导致许多历史教师“低估了学生的能力,并使他们自身的教学方法最终成为自我实现的预言”。 76历史教育家约翰·芬尼斯也持类似观点,他声称整整一代教师都“被皮亚杰的分析吓倒了”。 77虽然很难评估这些说法的准确性,但显然皮亚杰的研究支持了历史学家G· 埃尔顿的观点,即只有学生进入大学,才能真正开始严肃的历史研究。 78同样显而易见的是,这些悲观的评估也激发了其他研究,特别是那些旨在发现学生历史能力中更光明一面的研究。

One question that remains from Piagetian research on history was its impact on practice. In the opinion of Henry G. Macintosh, the past secretary of the British Southern Regional Examinations Board, Piagetian studies caused many history teachers “to undervalue the capacities of their own students and [helped] to ensure that their own teaching methods [made] it a self-fulfilling prophesy.”76 Similar observations came from John Fines, a history educator who claimed that a whole generation of teachers had been “cowed by Piagetian analysis.”77 While it is difficult to assess the accuracy of these claims, it is clear that Piagetian research lent support to the historian G. R. Elton's claim that serious work in history could not begin until students entered university.78 It is also clear that these pessimistic assessments spurred on other research efforts, particularly those aimed at discovering a brighter side of student's historical capabilities.

这正是学校理事会历史13-16岁项目成员们面临的挑战。该项目于1973年在利兹大学创立,最初约有60所学校参与,十年后发展壮大,涵盖了英国20%的中学。 79该项目的初衷是重新思考历史的本质及其在中学教育中的重要性,但总体而言,该项目提供了一个关于历史学科心理学的全面模型。 80

This was precisely the challenge before the members of the Schools Council History 13–16 Project. Founded at the University of Leeds in 1973 with approximately sixty participating schools, it grew in ten years to include 20 percent of all British high schools.79 Its original mission was a reconsideration of the nature of history and its relevance in secondary schools, but in its totality the project offered nothing less than a comprehensive model of the psychology of the subject matter.80

该项目大量借鉴了保罗·赫斯特关于学科作为知识形式的理论。赫斯特认为,学科不仅仅是相关主题的集合,而是从根本上构成了……不同的认知方式。81因此,所有知识形式都表现出四个特征:(a)概念和关键思想体系——通用词汇;(b)关联这些概念和思想的独特方式——该词汇的“句法”;(c)确立真理主张依据的特征方式,例如心理学家诉诸实验室,或历史学家诉诸文献记录;以及(d)独特的探究形式,例如化学家使用X射线光谱学或物理学家使用直线加速器。

The project drew heavily on Paul Hirst's theory of academic disciplines as forms of knowledge. Hirst believed that the disciplines were more than groupings of related topics but constituted fundamentally different ways of knowing.81 Accordingly, all knowledge forms exhibited four characteristics: (a) a body of concepts and key ideas—a common vocabulary; (b) distinctive ways of relating these concepts and ideas—a “syntax” for this vocabulary; (c) characteristic ways of establishing warrant for truth claims, such as the psychologist's appeal to the laboratory, or the historian's to the documentary record; and (d) distinctive forms of inquiry, such as the chemist's use of X-ray spectroscopy or the physicist's use of a linear accelerator.

项目发起人认为,传统历史教学提供的是一种信息,而非知识。学生或许能掌握一套既定的叙事框架,却缺乏评估该框架的方法,无法判断它或其他任何叙事是否引人入胜或真实可信。该项目的评估员,后任项目负责人丹尼斯·谢米尔特(Denis Shemilt)将传统历史课的学生比作戏剧专业的学生,​​后者“能条理清晰地谈论《李尔王》中的各个场景和人物,却不知道戏剧究竟是什么”。 82换句话说,这些学生掌握了大量的历史信息,却不知这些信息从何而来。

Project founders argued that traditional history instruction constitutes a form of information, not a form of knowledge. Students might master an agreed-upon narrative, but they lacked any way of evaluating it, of deciding whether it, or any other narrative, was compelling or true. Denis Shemilt, the evaluator of the project and later its director, compared students from traditional history classes to drama students who could talk “sensibly about the separate scenes and characters of King Lear, but do not know what a play is.”82 Put differently, such students possessed copious amounts of historical information but had no idea where this information came from.

学校理事会制定的三年制历史课程从八年级开始。该课程采用非编年史式的教学方法,首先开设一门名为“什么是历史?”的课程,向学生介绍历史证据的本质、如何运用证据进行推理,以及如何从不完整或混合的证据中重建历史。课程的其他部分则引导学生参与历史研究项目,并让他们深入探究特定主题(例如,伊丽莎白时代的英国、1815-1851年的英国、美国西部、共产主义中国的崛起、阿以冲突)。此外,课程还涵盖了医学史等其他主题,因为这些主题能让学生接触到与自身截然不同的实践、信仰和思维方式。

The Schools Council three-year curriculum began in the eighth grade. It took a nonchronological approach to history, beginning with a course called “What Is History?” that introduced students to the nature of historical evidence, the nature of reasoning from evidence, and problems of reconstruction from partial and mixed evidence. Other parts of the curriculum engaged students in historical research projects and thrust them into intensive inquiries on selected topics (e.g., Elizabethan England, Britain in the years 1815–1851, the American West, the rise of communist China, the Arab-Israeli conflict). Still other topics, like the history of medicine, were included in the curriculum because they exposed students to practices, beliefs, and ways of thinking radically different from their own.

20世纪70年代末对该项目进行的一项评估包含三个部分:(a) 对500名项目组学生和500名对照组学生进行一系列历史概念测试,并进行比较;(b) 对75名项目组学生和75名对照组学生进行配对比较,并进行其他概念测试(受试者按性别、智商和社会经济地位进行匹配);(c) 对78对学生进行配对研究,研究人员通过访谈了解学生对历史探究本质的看法。83在对项目组学生和对照组进行比较之前,项目组工作人员首先需要……为了捕捉历史研究中“知识形式”的视角,研究人员发明了相应的衡量标准和编码方案。例如,配对访谈中学生对历史本质的回答被编码为四个等级,涵盖了历史概念化的各个层面。一级回答带有“因果性”的色彩。事件的发生仅仅是因为它们发生了,除了时间顺序之外,没有其他内在逻辑。二级回答以“严苛的加尔文主义逻辑”看待历史,将历史重建等同于将拼图碎片拼入预先存在的图案中。84在三级,青少年开始意识到历史叙事与“过去”之间的脱节,认识到前者包含选择性和判断性,永远无法反映后者的全部复杂性。在四级,学生超越了对普遍历史规律的探寻,开始理解历史解释是受语境制约且对语境敏感的。

An evaluation of the project conducted in the late 1970s contained three components: (a) a comparison of 500 project and 500 control students on a series of historical concept tests; (b) a matched-pairs comparison of seventy-five project and seventy-five control students on other concept tests (subjects were matched according to sex, IQ, and socioeconomic status); and (c) a matched-pairs study of seventy-eight pairs in which researchers engaged students in interviews about the nature of historical inquiry.83 But before comparisons could be made between project students and the control group, project staff first had to invent measures and coding schemes to capture the “form of knowledge” approach to history. For example, student's responses about the nature of history from the matched-pairs interviews were coded using one of four levels spanning the range of historical conceptualization. Level I responses had a “just because” quality. Events happened because they happened, with no inner logic other than their arrangement in temporal sequence. Level II responses viewed history with “an austere, Calvinistic logic” equating historical reconstruction with slotting pieces of a puzzle into a pre-existing form.84 At Level III, adolescents had a dawning awareness of a disjuncture between historical narratives and “the past” recognizing that the former involved selectivity and judgment and could never reflect the latter in all its complexity. At Level IV, students transcended the search for overarching historical laws and came to understand historical explanation as context-bound and context-sensitive.

在这一类型划分中,项目组学生达到最高两个等级的比例为68%,而对照组学生仅为29%。最低等级的比例为15%(对照组),而项目组学生仅为1%。在三个评估组成部分中,项目组学生的表现均优于传统课堂的学生。例如,50%的对照组学生无法区分历史知识和科学知识,而项目组学生中只有10%的人无法区分。当被问及历史和数学的难易程度时,83%的对照组学生认为数学比历史更难,而项目组学生中只有25%的人持相同观点。正如一位对照组学生所说:“历史只要查资料就行了,数学要自己。”另一位对照组学生补充道:“数学里一个公式可以推导出三四个其他公式,但历史没有规律可循。”

The two highest levels of this typology were attained by 68 percent of project students versus 29 percent of the control group. The lowest level was occupied by 15 percent of control-group students versus 1 percent of project students. In each of the three evaluation components, project students outperformed their counterparts from traditional classrooms. For example, 50 percent of control-group students were unable to differentiate between historical and scientific knowledge, versus only 10 percent of project students. And when students were asked to compare history and mathematics, 83 percent of control students saw math as more difficult than history, versus 25 percent of project students. As one student from the control group put it, “In history you just look it up, math you work it out”; another control-group student added, “From one formula in Maths you get three or four others following, but history has no pattern.”85

评估结果总体上支持了这样一种观点:青少年可以被教导去理解历史,将其视为一种复杂的知识形式。然而,谢米尔特的评估研究并非完全成功,正如他所指出的,对照组学生和项目组学生之间的差异可以比作“贫瘠荒芜、勉强能养活几株杂草的土地,与精心耕耘却杂乱无章、几朵绚丽花朵艰难绽放的花园之间的差异” 。86

The overall picture emerging from the evaluation supported the idea that adolescents could be taught to understand history as a sophisticated form of knowledge. Yet Shemilt's evaluation study was not the story of unqualified success, for, as he noted, the difference between control students and project students could be compared “to the difference between stony, derelict ground barely able to support a few straggling weeds and a cultivated but undisciplined garden in which a few splendid blossoms struggle to show through.”86

即便如此,项目学生所描绘的青少年推理图景与皮亚杰学派所描绘的青少年推理的贫瘠图景形成了鲜明对比。约翰·芬尼斯敏锐地察觉到了这种对比,他他在评估报告的引言中指出,项目学生“似乎比皮亚杰学派最初预想的要好得多”。 87然而,尽管谢米尔特谨慎地将学校理事会的努力与皮亚杰学派区分开来,但学校理事会项目——从其衡量指标的性质到其达到的水平,甚至其结果的图表布局——都无法脱离这一研究传统而得到理解。人们处处都能感受到皮亚杰的存在,他有时是试金石,有时是启发者,有时又是点头的观察者,始终在场,尽管并非总是被承认。

Even so, the portraits of adolescent reasoning offered by project students contrasted sharply with the barren images of adolescent reasoning offered by the Piagetians. This contrast was not lost on John Fines, who in his introduction to the evaluation report noted that project students “seem to be performing much more hopefully than the Piagetians first thought.”87 Yet, while Shemilt was careful to distinguish the Schools Council effort from the Piagetians, the Schools Council Project—from the nature of its measures to its levels of attainment, and even the graphic layout of its results—is impossible to conceptualize apart from that research tradition. One feels Piaget's presence at every turn, acting sometimes as touchstone, at other times as provocateur, and at yet other times as nodding observer, always at hand if not always acknowledged.

诚然,谢米尔特在多处承认了对皮亚杰的借鉴,甚至对皮亚杰理论的适用性表示乐观,前提是这些理论必须首先“专门针对”历史的需要进行调整。 88 然而,他并未提及的是,这项评估研究与一些人所谓的皮亚杰-皮尔-哈勒姆传统 89在研究方法上存在某种相似之处,即两种方法都倾向于让儿童扮演“小小哲学家”的角色,提出的问题更像是形而上学的讨论,而非历史的讨论(例如,“事物的必然性是否意味着我们无法控制它们?” “如果一个事件可以被改变,如果它可以被改变,那么它怎么可能是必然的呢?”)。 90毫无疑问,这些问题与历史理解息息相关。但是,将学生对抽象问题的回答等同于他们在处理具体历史材料时的反应是危险的。正如心理语言学家告诉我们的那样,完美地使用过去完成时是一回事,而解释我们如何使用它又是另一回事。

To be sure, Shemilt recognized the debt to Piaget in several places and even signaled a certain optimism about the applicability of Piagetian constructs, provided that they were first “specifically tailored” to the exigencies of history.88 Left unacknowledged, however, was a certain similarity in research approach between the evaluation study and what some have called the Piaget-Peel-Hallam tradition,89 a shared tendency by both approaches to thrust children into the role of mini-philosopher, with questions more germane to a discussion in metaphysics than one in history (e.g., “Does the fact that things are inevitable mean that we have no control over them?” “If an event can be altered, if it can be changed, how can it be inevitable?”).90 No doubt such questions have a bearing on historical understanding. But there is danger in equating student's responses to abstract queries with how they might respond when dealing with concrete historical materials. As the psycholinguists have taught us, it is one thing to use the pluperfect flawlessly and quite another to explain how we do it.

总体而言,13-16岁历史项目评估研究对青少年历史推理能力进行了迄今为止最深入的考察。鉴于这一图景的复杂性,人们或许会期待对等式另一半——参与该项目的教师的知识、理解和实践——给予同样的关注。然而,评估研究在这方面提供的见解却相对较少。与传统的前后测实验类似,13-16岁评估研究大致展现了学生的初始水平,并提供了他们在项目结束时发生变化的证据。但除了诉诸书面课程材料之外,该研究未能解释这种变化。教师在以初级水平学生为主的课堂上是如何教学的?复杂的历史理解概念是如何转化为课堂活动、教师讲解或学生作业的?通往更高理解水平的关键节点是什么?

In its totality, the evaluation study of the History 13–16 Project yielded the most in-depth look at adolescent historical reasoning to date. Given the complexity of this portrait, one might expect similar attention to be devoted to the other half of the equation—the knowledge, understanding, and practices of the teachers who participated in the project. Here the evaluation study offered fewer insights. Like the traditional pre/post experiment, the 13–16 Evaluation Study provided some sense of where students began and provided evidence that they were different at the end. But beyond an appeal to written curricular materials, it was at a loss to explain change. What did teachers do in classes filled with Level I students? How did sophisticated notions of historical understanding get translated into classroom activities, explanations by teachers, or homework assignments for students? What were the key way stations along the path to higher understanding?

“13-16岁历史项目”几乎没有提供任何答案。此外,教师需要了解哪些知识才能实施该课程的问题也未得到解答。事实上,有迹象表明,一些项目教师可能与处于I级和II级水平的学生更为相似,而非IV级水平的学生。在问卷调查中,近一半的项目教师认为一手资料“必然比二手资料更可靠”,16%的教师同意“过去的人和现在的人思考和行为方式完全相同,只是环境不同”的说法。 91谢米尔特(Shemilt)关于“教师需要熟悉项目理念和目标”的免责声明显然不得要领。92关键问题是:我们如何改变教师根深蒂固的历史观念?我们能够改变这些观念吗?

The History 13–16 Project provided few answers. Moreover, the question of what teachers needed to know in order to enact this curriculum was not addressed. In fact, there are clues that some project teachers may have had more in common with students functioning at Levels I and II than with those at Level IV. Responding to questionnaire items, nearly half of project teachers believed that primary sources were “necessarily more reliable than secondary sources” and 16 percent agreed with the statement that “people in the past thought and behaved in exactly the same way as people today, and that only the setting was different.”91 Shemilt's disclaimer that “teachers need to familiarize themselves with Project philosophy and objectives” surely missed the point.92 The key question is this: How do we alter teacher's deeply held beliefs about history? Can we alter them?

认知革命:发展与可能性

THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION: DEVELOPMENTS AND POSSIBILITIES

每一次革命都会激发新的希望,“认知革命”也不例外。93的学校学习图景有望解答一些问题,这些问题不仅自科学心理学诞生以来就困扰着研究人员,而且自人类开始思考“知”和“学”的意义以来就一直困扰着他们。在20世纪70年代和80年代,认知研究人员阐明了学生在各种学校科目中的思维方式,从算术、生物、物理和几何等传统科目到计算机科学和经济学等新兴课程。然而,在这一研究蓬勃发展的时期,历史却被忽视了。事实上,最早尝试汇集学校学习新研究成果的著作之一,艾伦·加涅的《学校学习的认知心理学》,包含了400多篇参考文献——但没有一篇与历史相关。94

Every revolution inspires new hopes, and the “cognitive revolution” was no exception.93 New images of school learning promised to answer questions that had puzzled researchers not only since the beginning of scientific psychology, but since humankind began asking itself what it meant to know and to learn. During the 1970s and 1980s, cognitive researchers illuminated student's thinking in an array of school subjects, from traditional ones like arithmetic, biology, physics, and geometry to newer additions to the curriculum such as computer science and economics. But amidst this efflorescence of research, history was ignored. Indeed, one of the first attempts to draw together the new work on school learning, Ellen Gagné' The Cognitive Psychology of School Learning, contained over 400 references—not one of which applied to history.94

20世纪90年代见证了一场剧变。认知研究人员弥补了此前错失的良机,开展了一系列研究,探讨了从儿童历史误解到历史教科书阅读、从教师学科知识到历史教学专业水平评估等诸多议题。以下讨论将概述这些及其他方面的进展。

The 1990s witnessed a dramatic change. Cognitive researchers made up for lost time by launching investigations that addressed topics from children's historical misconceptions to their reading of history textbooks, from teacher's subject matter knowledge to the assessment of expertise in history teaching. The following discussion surveys these and other developments.

学习

Learning

认知学习方法的核心观点之一是,学习者在学习过程中会带入多种信念和概念,其中一些信念和概念是学习者已有的认知基础。一些认知是真实的,另一些则顽固地被否定,人们通过这些认知来过滤新的信息。虽然先前的研究已经描绘出儿童历史信念的某些方面,尤其是在时间和年表方面,但最近的研究探索了他们对一系列主题和想法的看法。95

One of the core insights of the cognitive approach to learning is that the learner brings to instruction a mixture of beliefs and conceptions, some true and others stubbornly false, through which new information is filtered. Although prior research mapped out some aspects of children's historical beliefs, particularly in the area of time and chronology, recent studies have explored their thinking on a range of topics and ideas.95

盖尔·辛纳特拉、伊莎贝尔·贝克和玛格丽特·麦基翁概述了五年级学生在历史课上所具备的背景知识。96接受美国历史课程之前,研究人员采访了35名五年级学生;在接受课程之后,又采访了37名六年级学生。采访中,学生们被问及诸如“我们为什么要庆祝7月4日?” “我们的国家是如何形成的?”以及“曾经有一句谚语‘无代表不纳税’,你认为它是什么意思?”等问题。即使经过一年的教学,学生们的回答仍然缺乏清晰的理解:74%的五年级学生和57%的六年级学生在回答中没有提及英国与殖民地之间的战争,60%的学生无法提供关于美国独立战争动机的任何信息。

Gail Sinatra, Isabel Beck, and Margaret McKeown provided a sketch of the background knowledge the typical fifth grader brings to history instruction.96 In interviews with thirty-five fifth graders prior to instruction in American history and thirty-seven sixth graders following instruction, students were asked questions such as “Why do we celebrate the Fourth of July?” “How did our country become a country?” and “Once there was a saying ‘no taxation without representation.’ What do you think that means?” Shaky understanding characterized student's responses, even after a year of instruction: 74 percent of fifth graders and 57 percent of sixth graders did not mention the war between Great Britain and the colonies in their responses, and 60 percent of all students could provide no information about the motivation of the Revolutionary War.

但学生们并非一张白纸。关于七月四日的问题,他们往往会想到“战争中阵亡者的纪念碑”。同样,关于《独立宣言》的问题,他们的回答也五花八门,从解放奴隶到《五月花号公约》都有涉及。与其他学科的认知探索以及迈耶早期的研究一样,辛纳特拉和她的同事们超越了简单的对错题方法,转而探索学生回答中存在的系统性模式。

But students were hardly blank slates. Questions about the Fourth of July often elicited responses about memorials of “deaths of people who were in wars.” Similarly, questions about the Declaration of Independence elicited responses ranging from the freeing of slaves to the Mayflower Compact. Like cognitive explorations in other subjects, and Myer's earlier work, Sinatra and her colleagues went beyond a right/wrong answer approach to explore systematic patterns in student's responses.

布鲁斯·范斯莱德赖特和杰里·布罗菲也研究了小学生对历史的看法。他们采访了十名四年级学生,了解他们对美国历史关键主题的看法。97虽然范斯莱德赖特和布罗菲也发现孩子们对这些主题的了解十分有限,但他们发现有些孩子愿意就他们知之甚少的事件构建叙事。一位名叫海伦的十岁女孩,极富讲故事天赋,她讲述了清教徒乘坐一艘名为“五月花号”的船(并补充说:“这就是‘四月雨带来五月花’这句谚语的由来”)在密歇根州“上半岛”某处的普利茅斯岩定居的故事。 98为了构建这些故事,一些孩子将学校里学到的不同历史事件的信息混淆起来,然后将这种混合信息与从动画片或感恩节等文化庆典中收集到的信息片段结合起来。范斯莱德赖特和布罗菲得出结论,孩子们不仅能够构建关于过去的富有想象力的故事,而且还能够……在这些故事中可以看到一些模式,例如悲剧和悬疑等贯穿始终的主题。从这个意义上讲,幼儿的叙事重构可以被视为学院派历史学家用来叙述历史故事的“情节框架”的部分雏形。99

Bruce VanSledright and Jere Brophy also examined elementary school children's beliefs about history. They interviewed ten fourth graders about key topics in American history.97 Although VanSledright and Brophy also found knowledge of these topics to be sparse, they found that some children were willing to construct narratives about events for which they possessed little information. One gifted storyteller, ten-year-old Helen, spun tales about Pilgrims who sailed on a boat called the Mayflower (adding, “That's how we got ‘April showers bring May Flower’ ”) and settled at Plymouth Rock, located somewhere in Michigan's “upper peninsula.”98 To construct these stories, some children conflated information learned in school about different historical events, and then combined this mixture with snippets of information gleaned from cartoon shows or cultural celebrations such as Thanksgiving. VanSledright and Brophy concluded that children were able not only to construct imaginative stories about the past, but also to see patterns in these stories, overarching themes of tragedy and suspense. In this sense, young children's narrative reconstructions may be viewed as partially formed precursors of the “emplotments ”used by academic historians to narrate their stories of the past.99

儿童天马行空的想象可以被归类到大卫·珀金斯所称的“内容框架”中,即一系列对美国历史特定时期和事件的误解。100罗莎琳·阿什比和彼得·李则探讨了珀金斯所谓的“认知框架”,即儿童用来解读历史的更为普遍和宽泛的信念。101他们没有像之前的研究那样直接与儿童进行访谈,102而是将青少年分成三人一组,并拍摄他们阅读有关盎格鲁-撒克逊人宣誓协助和磨难的文献时的互动过程。阿什比和李从数百小时的录像资料中创建了一系列类别,用来描述儿童的“历史同理心”,即“理解并接受一套信念和价值观……不一定是他们自己的”。103最不擅长此道的学生将历史视为“愚蠢的过去”(源自英国俚语,意为“愚钝、迟钝或智力缺陷”),对历史抱有“恼怒的不理解和蔑视”。104处于类型学中间层级的学生开始将历史视为一种解释体系,但很少尝试从历史本身的角度去理解它。只有在最高层级,孩子们才开始意识到过去和现在思维模式的差异,或者说时代精神心态的历史变迁。尽管阿什比和李将他们的类型学视为描述儿童对过去思维的一种方式,但它也可能反映了成人思维的某些方面。事实上,一些证据表明,“永恒的过去”这一概念——即现在的概念可以很容易地被带回到过去——被一些大学生所接受,无论他们是否是历史专业的学生。105

Children's fanciful elaborations can be classified within what David Perkins has called a “content frame” a set of misunderstandings about specific eras and events in American history.100 Rosalyn Ashby and Peter Lee addressed what Perkins calls the “epistemic frame” more general and sweeping beliefs that children use to interpret the past.101 Rather than engaging children in interviews, the strategy used in their prior work,102 they grouped adolescents into trios and videotaped their interactions as they worked through documents about Anglo-Saxon oath-helping and the ordeal. From hundreds of hours of videotape, Ashby and Lee created a set of categories to characterize children's “historical empathy” the “intellectual achievement” of “entertain[ing] a set of beliefs and values…not necessarily their own.”103 Students least able to do this saw history as a “divi past” (from the British slang for “thick, dumb, or mentally defective”), regarding the subject with “irritated incomprehension and contempt.”104 Students occupying the middle levels of the typology began to view history as an explanatory system but made little attempt to understand the past on its own terms. Only at the highest levels did children start to recognize differences between past and present mind-sets, or historical changes in Zeitgeist and mentalité. Although Ashby and Lee viewed their typology as a way of characterizing children's thinking about the past, it may also capture aspects of adult's thinking as well. Indeed, some evidence suggests that the notion of the “timeless past” the idea that concepts from the present can be easily transported back in time, is embraced by some university students—history majors and nonmajors alike.105

阅读历史教科书

Reading History Textbooks

近期的研究也聚焦于学生对历史教科书的理解。该领域最早的研究将文本设计原则应用于教科书的编写。106 Bonnie Armbruster 和 Tom Anderson 发现,典型的历史教科书未能为读者提供“周全”的论述,即未能使读者能够通过解释确定以下几点:(a) 行动或事件的目标;(b) 实现该目标的计划;(c) 为应对该目标而采取的行动;以及 (d) 结果。107 Armbruster 和 Anderson 认为,如果一本教科书未能解决这些问题,那么它就失败了。“作为一种历史解释。” 108伊莎贝尔·贝克及其同事在一项更广泛的研究中也得出了类似的结论。 109他们发现,五年级教科书假定读者具备大多数孩子所缺乏的背景知识。与阿姆布鲁斯特和安德森一样,贝克的团队也提议重写历史教科书,使用他们所谓的“因果/解释性”联系,即把原因与事件联系起来,再把事件与结果联系起来。

Recent research efforts have also focused on student's understanding of history textbooks. The earliest work in this area applied principles of text design to the writing of textbooks.106 Bonnie Armbruster and Tom Anderson found that typical history books failed to offer readers “considerate” treatments, or ones in which explanations allowed the reader to determine (a) the goal of an action or event, (b) the plan for attaining that goal, (c) the action that was taken in response, and (d) the outcome.107 If a text failed to address these issues, according to Armbruster and Anderson, it failed “as a historical explanation.”108 Isabel Beck and her colleagues reached similar conclusions in a more extensive study.109 They found that fifth-grade textbooks presumed background knowledge most children lacked. Like Armbruster and Anderson, Beck's team proposed rewriting history textbooks, using, in their words, “causal/explanatory” linkages, or linkages that connect a cause to an event and an event to a consequence.

贝克及其同事在文本分析领域的基础上,设计出符合认知文本设计原则的段落。他们进行了一项实验,将原始文本段落与其改写后的版本进行比较。例如,一本教科书中关于法国和印第安人战争的解释,开头是“1763年,英国及其殖民地结束了与法国和印第安人长达7年的战争”,他们对其进行了改写,加入了建立背景信息和衔接句子的内容。新段落的开头是“大约250年前,英国和法国都声称拥有北美这片土地的所有权。”

Beck and her colleagues built on their work in text analysis to design passages that conformed to principles of cognitive text design. They conducted an experiment in which original text passages were compared with their rewritten counterparts.110 For example, a textbook explanation about the French and Indian War that began, “In 1763 Britain and the colonies ended a 7-year war with the French and Indians” was rewritten to include material that established context and provided linkages between sentences. The new passage began, “About 250 years ago, Britain and France both claimed to own some piece of land, here, in North America.”111

研究人员将85名四、五年级学生随机分配到原版文本组和修订版文本组,并比较了他们对两种文本形式中信息记忆能力的差异。结果显示,两组学生的记忆力存在显著差异(原版文本组124个单元中仅记住17个,而修订版文本组124个单元中记住24个),这在一定程度上支持了“教科书可以通过修订来帮助学生记住更多信息”的观点。一项后续研究表明,48名五年级学生在实验者引导的讲解中“获得了背景知识”,他们能够更好地理解修订版文本而非原版文本。112这一发现支持了“背景知识对阅读结构良好的文本最有帮助”的观点。

Researchers assigned 85 fourth- and fifth-grade students to original and revised text conditions and compared them according to their ability to recall ideas present in both forms. There was a statistically significant difference in recall (17 of 124 units in the original text condition versus 24 of 124 in the revised condition), providing modest support for the notion that textbooks can be revised to allow students to retain more information from them. An extension of this work showed that forty-eight fifth graders who were “provided with background knowledge” in an experimenter-led presentation were able to understand revised texts better than the originals.112 This finding supported the notion that background knowledge helps most when readers are given well-structured texts.

文本设计与分析方面的研究表明,认知原则可以用来使历史教科书更加“周到”。一种更有效的提升学生理解力的方法或许是教会学生如何应对那些本质上缺乏周到性的文本。艾文·克里斯莫尔(Avon Crismore)在对历史教科书和学术历史著作的比较中发现,“元话语”(metadiscourse)或判断、强调和不确定性的表达在历史著作中频繁出现,但在教科书中却通常会被删减。例如,历史学家大量使用“模糊词”来表示不确定性,例如使用情态动词(“可能”、“也许”)、某些动词(“暗示”、“似乎”、“看起来”)和限定词(“可能”、“也许”)来传达……历史知识的不确定性。但克里斯莫尔发现,教科书通常会省略模糊措辞。她认为,这种写作方式或许更“周到”,但也可能导致学生常常将了解历史等同于“了解事实” ¹¹⁴,并带着这一单一目标去阅读教科书。¹¹⁵正如克里斯莫尔所观察到的

The work on text design and analysis demonstrates that cognitive principles can be used to make history textbooks more “considerate.” A more robust approach to improving student's understanding might teach students to deal with texts that are, by nature, inconsiderate. In a comparison of history textbooks and academic historical writing, Avon Crismore found that “metadiscourse” or indications of judgment, emphasis, and uncertainty, were used frequently in historical writing but typically edited out of textbooks.113 For example, historians rely heavily on “hedges” to indicate indeterminacy, using such devices as modal auxiliaries (“may, ”“might”), certain verbs (“suggest” “appear” “seem”), and qualifiers (“possibly” “perhaps”) to convey the uncertainty of historical knowledge. But Crismore found that textbooks typically eliminated hedges. Such writing, she suggested, may be more “considerate” but it may also contribute to the finding that students often equate knowing history with “knowing the facts”114 and approach their textbook with that singular goal in mind.115 As Crismore observed:

如果态度元话语被推迟到成年期,并且读者没有被鼓励积极参与阅读过程,批判性阅读会发生什么变化?……年轻读者需要尽早了解作者的偏见并对其进行评估;教科书和教师需要教会他们如何做到这一点。116

What happens to critical reading when attitudinal metadiscourse is delayed until adulthood and readers are not encouraged to become active participants in the reading process?…Young readers need to see author biases and evaluate them at an early age; textbooks and teachers need to teach them how to do this.116

教学

Teaching

在1950年至1975年的二十五年间,课堂教学研究明显带有行为主义色彩,主要关注诸如课堂提问频率和教师回应的强化作用等具体的教学行为。这种方法的核心假设是各学科之间存在根本的相似性。内容上的差异被视为“情境变量”,即便有所提及,也只是在对研究结果局限性的简短讨论中出现。在20世纪60年代和70年代,教学研究在具体技能的教学方面取得了最大的成功,教师会检查学生对某个具体结果的理解程度,然后指导学生完成类似的练习或习题。但正如巴拉克·罗森沙因在分析时任教育部长威廉·贝内特讲授的关于《联邦党人文集》第十篇的历史课时所指出的那样,技能教学的研究几乎没有涉及内容教学:“我们甚至没有一个合适的名称来描述它……如何教授这些内容和思想?技能模式对我们帮助不大。” 117

For the twenty-five years between 1950 and 1975, research on classroom teaching had a decidedly behaviorist cast that focused on discrete teaching acts like the frequency of classroom questions and the reinforcing qualities of teacher's responses. At the core of this approach was an assumption about the fundamental similarity among the school subjects. Variations in content were cast as “context variables” and emerged (if at all) in brief discussions about the limitations of research findings. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, research on teaching witnessed its greatest success in the teaching of discrete skills, in which a teacher checks for understanding on a concrete outcome and then guides students in doing similar problems or exercises. But as Barak Rosenshine noted in his analysis of a history lesson on Federalist No. 10, taught by then-Secretary of Education William Bennett, research on skill teaching had virtually nothing to say about the teaching of content: “We do not even have a good name for it…. How does one teach this content and these ideas? The skill model does not help us much.”117

斯坦福大学的李·舒尔曼(Lee Shulman)称教学内容研究的匮乏是一个“缺失的范式”,并着手开展一项研究计划来解决这个问题。 118 “教学知识增长项目”(1983-1989)是一项纵向研究,追踪教师从师范教育项目开始到全职教学的第一年和第二年的知识变化。对四位历史/社会研究教师的知识增长情况的考察是该项目最早的研究报告之一(见本书第六章)。

Stanford University's Lee Shulman called the lack of research on teaching content a “missing paradigm” and went on to develop a research program to address it.118 The Knowledge Growth in Teaching Project (1983–89) was a longitudinal study that tracked changes in teacher's knowledge from the beginning of their teacher education programs into the first and second years of full-time teaching. An examination of the knowledge growth of four history/social studies teachers was one of the first research reports (see Chapter 6 of this volume) to emerge from this project.

为了进一步探讨学科知识与教学之间的关系,我们开展了一系列“实践智慧”研究。在这些研究中,我们观察了11位杰出教师教授美国革命单元的过程。教师们还参与了一系列访谈,访谈形式多样,包括“知识自传”(教师们在访谈中重述了他们中学和大学教育的精彩瞬间)以及改良版的“出声思考法”(教师们在阅读华盛顿告别演说、《联邦党人文集》第84篇(汉密尔顿反对权利法案的论证)和其他原始文献时,将自己的想法表达出来)。(详见第八章,其中有相关示例。)

Work on the relationship between subject matter knowledge and teaching was extended in a series of “Wisdom of Practice” studies in which eleven accomplished teachers were observed teaching a unit on the American Revolution. Teachers also engaged in a series of interviews, ranging from an “intellectual autobiography” in which they reconstructed the high points of their high school and college education, to modified think-alouds in which they verbalized their thoughts as they read Washington's Farewell Address, Federalist No. 84 (Hamilton's argument against a bill of rights), and other primary documents. (See Chapter 8 for examples of this work.)

盖亚·莱因哈特是最早将认知原理应用于教学研究的研究者之一,她对理解历史教学所需的技能也做出了重大贡献。119在一项基于76节AP美国历史课的案例研究中,莱因哈特重点关注了一位经验丰富的历史教师的历史讲解方式,并区分出两种主要类型。 120 在“块状讲解”中,教师提供独立、相对模块化的解释。在“伊卡特讲解”中,教师给出简要的叙述或对某些内容进行简要提及,之后再进行扩展和阐述。在学年伊始,由于学生们难以理解宪法批准过程中的多重因果关系,或者难以理解比尔德和霍夫施塔特等人的不同解读,几乎所有的讲解都由教师完成。随着学年的进行,教师逐渐引导学生参与到构建解释的过程中。衡量她成功的一个指标是学生发言与教师发言的比例,年初时约为 40%,到第十三周时增长了近四倍。

Gaea Leinhardt, one of the first researchers to apply cognitive principles to research on teaching, has also made major contributions to understanding the skills that teaching history demands.119 In a case study of an experienced history teacher based on over seventy-six sessions in an Advanced Placement U.S. history class,120 Leinhardt focused on the teacher's historical explanations, distinguishing two main types. In “blocked explanations” the teacher provided a self-contained, relatively modular explanation. In “ikat explanations” the teacher gave an abbreviated account or made a passing reference to something that was later extended and elaborated. At the beginning of the school year, the teacher provided nearly all the explanations, as students struggled with notions of multiple causation in the ratification of the Constitution or the conflicting interpretations of a Beard or a Hofstadter. As the year went on, the teacher progressively drew students into the process of formulating explanations. One measure of her success was the proportion of student talk to teacher talk, which was about 40 percent at the beginning of the year and increased almost fourfold by the thirteenth week.

学生参与度的提高也具有重要的质性意义。学生们不仅仅是对老师的讲解做出更多回应;他们回应的内容也日益复杂。到一月份,莱因哈特分析的学生之一保罗已经将棉花经济的衰落与英国的贸易政策和在亚洲的殖民扩张,以及南方领导人未能把握英国的民意联系起来。学生们不仅学习了大量的事实材料,还学习如何运用这些材料构建他们自己相互关联的历史解释。121

This increase in student participation had an important qualitative dimension as well. Students were not simply saying more in response to the teacher's explanations; the content of their responses was characterized by an ever-increasing complexity. By January, Paul, one of the students Leinhardt analyzed, had linked the fall of a cotton-based economy to British trade policy and colonial ventures in Asia as well as to the failure of southern leaders to read public opinion in Great Britain. Students were learning not only a body of factual material but also how to use this material to craft their own interconnected historical explanations.121

对教师知识的研究标志着与20世纪70年代和80年代初的教学研究截然不同。研究人员放弃了行为观察法,转而采用深入访谈和针对少数教师的重点观察。与每六个月进行一两个小时的简短观察不同,这些课堂观察力求保持教学的流畅性,通常持续一个单元,但像莱因哈特那样,有时甚至长达近半年。这项研究也涉足了新的方法论领域,借鉴并改进了人类学家或社会语言学家常用的方法,而非心理学家常用的方法。这些研究并非试图构建适用于所有学科的教学理论,而是旨在生成适用于特定学科教学的中层理论,这些理论范围更窄,更具暂时性,或许对物理或体育教学有所启发,也或许没有。122这项工作的重点不是脱离教师思想的教师行为,而是教师的知识和他们的行为之间深刻而根本的联系。

The work on teacher knowledge represents a significant departure from the research on teaching that characterized the 1970s and early 1980s. Researchers abandoned behavioral observation schemes for intensive interviews and focused observations of a small number of teachers. Rather than brief samples of an hour or two every six months, observations in these classes tried to preserve the flow of instruction, usually over a unit but, as in Leinhardt's case, sometimes for nearly half a year. This work also ventured into new methodological territory, borrowing and modifying methods more commonly found in the anthropologist's or sociolinguist’ toolbox than in the psychologist's laboratory. Rather than attempting to formulate a theory of instruction that would hold for all subjects, these investigations aimed at generating theories of the middle range, narrower and more provisional theories that applied to the teaching of a particular subject, theories that might or might not have implications for teaching physics or physical education.122 The focus of this work was not teacher behavior isolated from teacher thought, but the deep and fundamental nexus between what teachers know and what they do.

这项研究描绘了令人信服的优秀教学案例。然而,这项研究的优势——对知识运用过程的细致刻画——也可能正是其不足之处。如同博物馆的展品吸引眼球,将目光聚焦于当下,这些案例更多地展现了现状,而非其形成过程。这些教师的学科知识是本科教育的产物,还是与之相关的因素?他们是如何引导学生将历史作为一种认知方式的?他们的失败是什么样的?他们又是如何从中吸取教训的?既然没有哪个教师能够通过参加为期两天的历史阐释工作坊就成为大师,那么我们该如何改变教师根深蒂固的关于历史本质的认知观念?最后一个问题尤为重要,因为这项关于教学的新研究的核心假设是:从专家身上汲取的经验可以用于指导新手。但是,我们究竟该如何将这些卓越的案例转化为能够培养卓越教师的教学方案呢?这些只是关于教师历史学科知识的新研究中提出的一些尚未解答的问题。

This research offers compelling portraits of exemplary teaching. But the strength of this work—its finely etched accounts of knowledge use in action—may also be its weakness. Like museum pieces that arrest the attention and focus it on the here and now, these images tell us more about what is than about how it came to be. Was the subject matter knowledge of these teachers a consequence of their undergraduate training or a covariate of it? How did these teachers learn to socialize students into history as a way of knowing? What did their failures look like, and how did they learn from them? Since no teacher is going to become a master by taking a two-day workshop on developing historical explanations, how do we alter teacher's deep-seated epistemic beliefs about the nature of history? This last question has special meaning, for at the core of this new work on teaching is the assumption that the lessons learned from experts can be used to teach novices. But how, exactly, do we turn portraits of excellence into programs that develop it? These are just some of the unanswered questions that arise from new research on teacher's subject matter knowledge in history.

结论

CONCLUSION

当前历史教学与学习研究的特点是研究方法多样,体现了认知方法的活力。在某些领域,历史并非其他学科研究成果的最终受益者,而是这些成果最初萌芽和扎根的地方。

Current research on history teaching and learning is characterized by diverse investigations that reflect the vigor of cognitive approaches. In several areas, history has not been the final beneficiary of insights gleaned from research on other subjects, but the site where these insights first germinated and took root.

有几个理由表明,人们对历史的重新关注绝非昙花一现。教育工作者和政策制定者日益认识到,历史推理问题的影响远远超出了历史课程的范畴。历史蕴藏着大量复杂而丰富的问题​​,与我们在日常生活中面临的社会问题颇为相似。探究这些问题需要一种超越“在文本中查找信息”技能的解读能力,而这种技能在许多学校作业中占据主导地位。了解学生如何应对这种复杂性,以及教师如何帮助他们应对,不仅能为改进学校历史教学提供知识基础,还能丰富阅读理解理论——令人惊讶的是,这些理论对人们如何解读复杂文本的过程却鲜有提及

There are several reasons to think that the new interest in history is more than a passing fad. There is a growing recognition by educators and policymakers that questions of historical reasoning carry implications that go well beyond the curricular borders of history.123 History offers a storehouse of complex and rich problems, not unlike those that confront us daily in the social world. Examining these problems requires an interpretive acumen that extends beyond the “locate information in the text” skills that dominate many school tasks. Understanding how students deal with such complexity, and how teachers aid them in doing so, would not only provide a knowledge base for improving school history but would also inform theories of reading comprehension, which are surprisingly mute about the processes used to form interpretations of complex written texts.124

还有三项发展有望继续引领历史研究的潮流。首先,近年来人们对叙事的关注日益增加,叙事的形成被视为一种“认知成就” 125 ,而将这一关注扩展到历史叙事的形成领域,无疑将大有裨益126 。专业历史学家们已经开始以日益增强的自我意识来探讨这一主题,而心理学家们也将在此方面做出重要贡献127 。其次,超媒体和计算机数据库等新技术为历史研究创造了几年前难以想象的可能性。目前正在开展多项研究,探索技术在增进历史理解方面的作用128 。最后,历史研究已成为学生和教师评估领域新发展的先河,并有望在未来继续成为一个充满活力的发展领域 129 。

Three additional developments promise to keep the spotlight on history. First, recent attention to narrative, which sees the formation of narrative as a “cognitive achievement”125 stands to gain much by extending its scope to the formation of historical narratives.126 This topic is already being taken up with increasing self-awareness by professional historians, and psychologists would have much to contribute to this effort.127 Second, new technologies such as hypermedia and computer data bases have created possibilities in history that were unimaginable a few years ago. A variety of efforts are under way that explore technology's role in enhancing historical understanding.128 Finally, history has already been the site of new developments in student and teacher assessment and promises to continue to be a rich development site in the future.129

对历史感兴趣的心理学家历来都从浩瀚的史学著作中寻找线索,以探究历史思维的本质。这些主要由历史学家和历史哲学家撰写的论文和专著,并非着眼于历史作品揭示的1812年战争、中世纪的日常生活或法属印度支那的灭亡,而是探​​究它们对更普遍的历史认知方式的阐释。仔细研读历史著作并从中推断其创作过程的策略,能够提供诸多洞见。然而,运用这种方法构建教学理论的问题在于……学习的本质在于,历史思维的最终产物可以通过诉诸完全不同的中间过程来解释。史学教我们如何识别熟练的认知,但对于如何获得这种认知却鲜有指导。

Psychologists interested in history have traditionally looked to the extensive body of historiographic writings for clues to the nature of historical thinking. This storehouse of essays and monographs, composed largely by historians and philosophers of history, looks at historical works not for what they disclose about the War of 1812, daily life in the Middle Ages, or the demise of French Indochina, but for what they say about historical knowing more generally.130 The strategy of looking carefully at written histories and inferring from them the processes used in their composition offers many insights. The problem with using this approach to build a theory of teaching and learning is that the final products of historical thinking can be explained by appealing to wholly different intermediate processes.131 Historiography teaches us how to recognize skilled cognition but gives us scant advice for how to achieve it.

理解历史思维的第二种途径。这种方法不如史学传统那样成熟,它考察了历史解释和结论形成过程中的步骤和误区。这项工作由研究者开展,他们进行实证研究,探究学生、教师和历史学家如何理解历史。 132它提出的问题涉及人们知道什么以及他们如何获得这些知识。通过这种方式,这种方法将认识论问题从虚无缥缈的表象中剥离出来,使其成为实证探究的对象。 133

There is a second way to understand what it means to think historically. Less developed than the historiographic tradition, this approach examines the steps and missteps that lead to the formation of historical interpretations and conclusions. This work is carried out by researchers who conduct empirical studies into how students, teachers, and historians come to understand history.132 It asks questions about what people know and how they come to know it. In so doing, this approach wrests questions of epistemology from the clouds and turns them into objects of empirical inquiry.133

此类研究可以追溯到二十世纪初,当时美国心理学会和美国哲学学会举行联合会议,因为心理学家和哲学家往往是同一人。作为一种研究策略,这种方法的思想渊源并非来自对哲学问题缺乏耐心的爱德华·桑代克 134 ,而是来自威廉·冯特。与他作为一位致力于将心理学确立为一门实证科学的实验主义者的大众形象相反135,鲜为人知的冯特是一位实证研究与他的认识论、逻辑学和伦理学著作相互交融的学者,他认为心理学和哲学相互依存,二者一旦分离,都将衰落 136 。历史理解本质上是一项跨学科的事业,只有采用多学科方法才能接近其复杂性。在这方面,目前的努力表明,未来将比过去更加丰富。

Such research would hark back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Society held joint meetings because the psychologist and the philosopher were often one and the same. As a research strategy, this approach would trace its intellectual ancestry not to Edward Thorndike, who displayed little patience with questions philosophical,134 but to Wilhelm Wundt. Contrary to his popular image as an experimentalist singularly determined to establish psychology as an empirical science,135 the lesser known Wundt was a man whose empirical investigations informed and were informed by his writings on epistemology, logic, and ethics, a man who argued that psychology and philosophy were so interdependent that, separated from one another, both would atrophy.136 At its heart, historical understanding is an interdisciplinary enterprise, and nothing less than a multidisciplinary approach will approximate its complexity. In this regard, present efforts suggest that the future will be richer than the past.

笔记

NOTES

本章最初发表于罗伯特·卡尔菲和戴维·柏林纳编辑的《教育心理学手册》(纽约,1996年)。自该书出版以来,关于历史教学与学习的新研究成果呈爆炸式增长。相关论文集包括彼得·N·斯特恩斯、彼得·塞克斯和萨姆·温伯格合著的《历史的认知、教学与学习:国家与国际视角》(纽约,2000年),以及詹姆斯·F·沃斯和马里奥·卡雷特罗合著的《历史中的学习与推理》(俄勒冈州波特兰,1998年)。另请参阅《叙事与生活史杂志》(1994年第4期)和《文化与心理学》(1994年第1期)的特刊。这两部著作均由詹姆斯·V·沃奇编辑。更新的文献综述包括:理查德·帕克斯顿和萨姆·温伯格合著的短文《历史教学》,载于《劳特利奇国际教育指南》 (伦敦,2000年);苏珊娜·M·威尔逊的《历史教学评论》,载于弗吉尼亚·理查森主编的《教学研究手册》(纽约,2001年);以及詹姆斯·沃斯的《历史学习中的问题》,载于《教育问题:教育心理学贡献》第4卷第2期(1998年),第163-209页。本文所载的评论已略作更新和编辑,以方便普通读者阅读。

 

This chapter originally appeared in the Handbook of Educational Psychology, edited by Robert Calfee and David Berliner (New York, 1996). Since its appearance there has been an explosion of new work on teaching and learning history. Edited collections of this work include Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York, 2000), and James F. Voss and Mario Carretero, Learning and Reasoning in History (Portland, Oreg., 1998). See, as well, the special issues of the Journal of Narrative and Life History (1994, no. 4) and Culture & Psychology (1994, no. 1), both of which were edited by James V. Wertsch. Updated literature reviews include a short co-written piece, Richard Paxton and Sam Wineburg, “History Teaching” in the Routledge International Companion to Education (London, 2000); Suzanne M. Wilson, “Review of History Teaching” in Virginia Richardson, ed., Handbook of Research on Teaching (New York, 2001); and James Vos's “Issues in the Learning of History” Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology 4, no. 2 (1998), 163–209. The review that appears here has been updated slightly and edited for a general audience.

 

1.我仅关注英文文献,但也承认其他语言中也存在重要的研究成果。例如,参见 J. Pozo 和 Mario Carretero 合著的《青少年作为历史学家》(“El Adolescente Como Historiador”),载于《儿童与学习》(Infancia y Aprendizaje) 23 (1983),75–90;Bodo von Borries 的《历史学习与自我发展》(“Geschichtslernen und Persönlichkeits-entwick-lung”),载于《历史教学》(Geschichts-Didaktic)12 (1987),1–14;以及 V. A. Kol'tsova 的《沟通中认知活动的实验研究(以概念形成为例)》(“Experimental Study of Cognitive Activity in Communication (with Specific Reference to Concept Formation)”),载于《苏联心理学》(Soviet Psychology ) 17 (1978),23–38。有关欧洲和中东历史教学趋势的概述,请参阅 Bodo von Borries 编辑的《青年与历史:欧洲青少年历史意识和政治态度比较调查》(德国汉堡,1997 年)。

1. I limit my focus to work in English while recognizing that important work has appeared in other languages. See, for example, J. Pozo and Mario Carretero, “El Adolescente Como Historiador” [The adolescent as historian], Infancia y Aprendizaje 23 (1983), 75–90; Bodo von Borries, “Geschichtslernen und Persönlichkeits-entwick-lung” [The learning of history and the development of self], Geschichts-Didaktic 12 (1987), 1–14; V. A. Kol'tsova, “Experimental Study of Cognitive Activity in Communication (with Specific Reference to Concept Formation)” Soviet Psychology 17 (1978), 23–38. For an overview of trends in history teaching in Europe and the Middle East, see Bodo von Borries, ed., Youth and History: A Comparative European Survey on Historical Consciousness and Political Attitudes Among Adolescents (Hamburg, Germany, 1997).

2.例如,Michael Frisch,“美国历史与集体记忆的结构:经验图像学的初步练习”,《美国历史杂志》 75(1989),1130-55;M. M. Miller 和 Peter N. Stearns,“在历史教学中应用认知学习方法:世界历史课程的实验”,《历史教师》 28(1995),183-204;Peter Seixas,“多元文化背景下青少年对历史的理解”,《课程探究》 23(1993),301-27;以及 Peter Seixas,“当心理学家讨论历史思维时:历史学家的视角”,《教育心理学家》 29(1999),107-9。

2. For example, Michael Frisch, “American History and the Structure of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography” Journal of American History 75 (1989), 1130–55; M. M. Miller and Peter N. Stearns, “Applying Cognitive Learning Approaches in History Teaching: An Experiment in a World History Course” History Teacher 28 (1995), 183–204; Peter Seixas, “Historical Understanding Among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting” Curriculum Inquiry 23 (1993), 301–27; and Peter Seixas, “When Psychologists Discuss Historical Thinking: A Historian's Perspective” Educational Psychologist 29 (1999), 107–9.

3. Michelene T. H. Chi、Paul J. Feltovich 和 Robert Glaser,“专家和新手对物理问题的分类和表示”,认知科学5 (1981),121-52。

3. Michelene T. H. Chi, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert Glaser, “Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices” Cognitive Science 5 (1981), 121–52.

4.有关早于此传统的英国著作的例子,请参阅 Frances Collie的《小学历史课程中的问题教学法》,载于《实验教育学与培训学院记录》 1 (1911),第 236-39 页;以及 R. E. Aldrich 的《新历史:历史视角》,载于 Alaric K. Dickinson、Peter J. Lee 和 Peter J. Rogers 编,《学习历史》(伦敦,1984 年),第 210-24 页。

4. For an example of British work that predates this tradition, see Frances Collie, “The Problem Method in the History Courses of the Elementary School” Journal of Experimental Pedagogy and Training College Record 1 (1911), 236–39; and R. E. Aldrich, “New History: An Historical Perspective” in Alaric K. Dickinson, Peter J. Lee, and Peter J. Rogers, eds., Learning History (London, 1984), 210–24.

5. Edward L. Thorndike,《教育心理学简明教程》纽约,1923 年),第 345 页。

5. Edward L. Thorndike, Educational Psychology—Briefer Course (New York, 1923), 345.

6. Edward L. Thorndike,《教育:第一本书》纽约,1912 年),第 144 页。

6. Edward L. Thorndike, Education: A First Book (New York, 1912), 144.

7. G. Stanley Hall,《教育问题》2 卷(纽约,1911 年),第 285-286 页。

7. G. Stanley Hall, Educational Problems, vol. 2 (New York, 1911), 285–86.

8.同上,第 296 页

8. Ibid., 296.

9.查尔斯·哈伯德·贾德,《高中生心理学》(波士顿,1915 年),第 384 页。

9. Charles Hubbard Judd, Psychology of High-School Subjects (Boston, 1915), 384.

10.美国历史学会七人委员会,《学校历史研究》(纽约,1899 年)。

10. Committee of Seven, American Historical Association, The Study of History in Schools (New York, 1899).

11.五人委员会,美国历史学会,《中学历史研究》纽约,1911 年)。

11. Committee of Five, American Historical Association, The Study of History in Secondary Schools (New York, 1911).

12. Judd,高中科目》,第379页。

12. Judd, High-School Subjects, 379.

13. J. Carleton Bell,“历史感”,《教育心理学杂志》 8 (1917),317。

13. J. Carleton Bell, “The Historic Sense” Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917), 317.

14.同上,第 317 页

14. Ibid., 317.

15.同上,第 318 页

15. Ibid., 318.

16.同上

16. Ibid.

17.同上

17. Ibid.

18. J. Carleton Bell 和 David F. McCollum,“美国历史上学生成就的研究”,《教育心理学杂志8(1917 年),257-74。

18. J. Carleton Bell and David F. McCollum, “A Study of the Attainments of Pupils in United States History” Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917), 257–74.

19.同上,第 257 页

19. Ibid., 257.

20.同上

20. Ibid.

21.同上,第 258 页

21. Ibid., 258.

22.同上

22. Ibid.

23.同上

23. Ibid.

24.同上,第 268-69 页

24. Ibid., 268–69.

25. D. H. Eikenberry,“高中学习的持久性”,《教育心理学杂志14(1923),463-81。

25. D. H. Eikenberry, “Permanence of High School Learning” Journal of Educational Psychology 14 (1923), 463–81.

26. Allan Nevins,“美国人的美国历史”,纽约时报杂志》(1942 年 5 月 3 日),第 6、28-29 页;参见Bernard DeVoto,“安乐椅”,《哈珀斯杂志》(1943 年 6 月),第 129-132 页;Diane Ravitch 和 Chester E. Finn, Jr.,《我们的 17 岁青少年知道什么?关于第一次全国历史和文学评估的报告》(纽约:1987 年)。

26. Allan Nevins, “American History for Americans” New York Times Magazine (May 3, 1942), 6, 28–29; cf. Bernard DeVoto, “The Easy Chair” Harper's Magazine (June 1943), 129–32; Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York: 1987).

27. Chester E. Finn 和 Diane Ravitch,“调查结果:美国17 岁青少年对历史和文学的了解少得惊人”,美国学校董事会杂志》 174 (1987),32。

27. Chester E. Finn and Diane Ravitch, “Survey Results: U.S. 17-Year-Olds Know Shockingly Little About History and Literature” American School Board Journal 174 (1987), 32.

28.这种“可耻”的描述出自 Ravitch 和 Finn 的《17 岁青少年》,第 201 页。参见Jack Granatstein 的《谁扼杀了加拿大历史?》(多伦多,1998 年),其中也提到了加拿大语境下的类似情况。关于 Granatstein 未能将其研究结果置于比较语境中进行考察的深刻批评,请参见 Chris Lorenz 的《比较史学:问题与视角》,载于《历史与理论》第 38 卷(1999 年),第 25-39 页。

28. This characterization as “shameful” comes from Ravitch and Finn, 17- Year-Olds, 201. See the parallels in a Canadian context, Jack Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto, 1998). For a penetrating critique of Granatstein's failure to consider his findings in a comparative context, see Chris Lorenz, “Comparative Historiography: Problems and Perspectives” History and Theory 38 (1999), 25–39.

29. Dale Whittington,“17 岁青少年过去知道些什么?”美国教育研究杂志28 (1991),759–80。

29. Dale Whittington, “What Have 17-Year-Olds Known in the Past?” American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991), 759–80.

30. Garry C. Myers,“历史中的延迟回忆”,教育心理学杂志》8(1917),275-83。

30. Garry C. Myers, “Delayed Recall in History” Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917), 275–83.

31.同上,第 277 页

31. Ibid., 277.

32.同上,第 282 页

32. Ibid., 282.

33.同上

33. Ibid.

34. Garry C. Myers,“回忆中的困惑”,《教育心理学杂志》 8(1917),174;Francis C. Bartlett,《记忆:实验和社会心理学研究》(纽约,1932)。

34. Garry C. Myers, “Confusion in Recall” Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917), 174; Francis C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (New York, 1932).

35. Myers,“混乱”175。有关艾宾豪思想的概述,请参阅 Gordon H. Bower 和 Ernest R. Hilgard 的学习理论》,第 5 版(新泽西州恩格尔伍德克利夫斯,1981 年)。

35. Myers, “Confusion” 175. For an overview of Ebbinhau's ideas, see Gordon H. Bower and Ernest R. Hilgard, Theories of Learning, 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1981).

36.迈尔斯, 《混乱》175。

36. Myers, “Confusion” 175.

37. David P. Ausubel,“学习中预先组织者的使用对有意义的语言材料的保留” 《教育心理学杂志》 51(1960),267-72。

37. David P. Ausubel, “The Use of Advance Organizers in the Learning and Retention of Meaningful Verbal Material” Journal of Educational Psychology 51 (1960), 267–72.

38. B. R. Buckingham,“美国历史教学效果指标建议”,教育研究杂志》1(1920),164。

38. B. R. Buckingham, “A Proposed Index in Efficacy in Teaching United States History” Journal of Educational Research 1 (1920), 164.

39. M. J. Van Wagenen,小学生的历史信息和判断力》(纽约,1919 年)。

39. M. J. Van Wagenen, Historical Information and Judgment in Pupils of Elementary Schools (New York, 1919).

40. Buckingham,“拟议指数”168

40. Buckingham, “Proposed Index” 168.

41.同上,第 170 页,原文强调

41. Ibid., 170, emphasis in original.

42.同上,第 171 页

42. Ibid., 171.

43. F. S. Camp,“需要:历史尺度制造者”教育研究杂志2 (1920),517。

43. F. S. Camp, “Wanted: A History Scale Maker” Journal of Educational Research 2 (1920), 517.

44.同上,第 518 页

44. Ibid., 518.

45.同上

45. Ibid.

46.例如,C. L. Harlan,“历史领域的教育测量”,《教育研究杂志》2(1920),849-53;C. W. Odell,“美国历史中的巴尔诊断测试”,学校与社会》16(1922),501-3;以及L. W. Sackett,“美国历史中的量表”,《教育心理学杂志》 10(1919),345-48。

46. For example, C. L. Harlan, “Educational Measurement in the Field of History” Journal of Educational Research 2 (1920), 849–53; C. W. Odell, “The Barr Diagnostic Tests in American History” School and Society 16 (1922), 501–3; and L. W. Sackett, “A Scale in United States History” Journal of Educational Psychology 10 (1919), 345–48.

47.参见 R. B. Weaver 和 A. E. Traxler,“美国初中历史论文考试和客观测试”,学校评论》 39(1931 年),689-95。

47. See R. B. Weaver and A. E. Traxler, “Essay Examinations and Objective Tests in United States History in the Junior High School” School Review 39 (1931), 689–95.

48. F. R. Gorman 和 D. S. Morgan,“关于明确的书面练习对美国历史课程学习影响的研究”,印第安纳州教育学院公报6 (1930),80-90。

48. F. R. Gorman and D. S. Morgan, “A Study of the Effect of Definite Written Exercises Upon Learning in a Course of American History” Indiana School of Education Bulletin 6 (1930), 80–90.

49.同上,第 90 页

49. Ibid., 90.

50.同上,第 81 页

50. Ibid., 81.

51.同上,第 90 页

51. Ibid., 90.

52. Raymond Callahan,《教育与效率崇拜》芝加哥,1962 年)。

52. Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, 1962).

53. Peter Novick,那个高尚的梦想:客观性问题”与美国历史学界》(英国剑桥,1988 年),第 23 页。

53. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: TheObjectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, England, 1988), 23.

54.同上

54. Ibid.

55. Sackett, “ A Scale” 348。

55. Sackett, “A Scale” 348.

56.引自诺维克,高贵的梦想》,200。

56. Cited in Novick, Noble Dream, 200.

57.在零星短暂的例外中,有 M. Clark 的作品历史证据使用练习的构建》,载于 T. L. Kelly 和 A. C. Krey 编辑的《社会科学中的测试和测量》 (纽约,1934 年),第 302-39 页。

57. Among the scattered and short-lived exceptions was the work of M. Clark, “The Construction of Exercises in the Use of Historical Evidence” in T. L. Kelly and A. C. Krey, eds., Tests and Measurements in the Social Sciences (New York, 1934), 302–39.

58. H. F. Arnold ,“历史领域某些学习技巧的比较有效性”教育心理学杂志33(1942),449-57。

58. H. F. Arnold, “The Comparative Effectiveness of Certain Study Techniques in the Field of History” Journal of Educational Psychology 33 (1942), 449–57.

59. Robert M. Gagné,“教学方法的学习基础”,载于 N. L. Gage 编,《教学方法心理学:全国教育研究学会第七十五届年鉴》(芝加哥,1976 年),第 30 页。

59. Robert M. Gagné, “The Learning Basis of Teaching Methods” in N. L. Gage, ed., The Psychology of Teaching Methods: Seventy-fifth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Chicago, 1976), 30.

60. Martin B. Booth,“技能、概念和态度:青少年儿童历史思维的发展”,历史与理论》 22 (1983),101–17。另见 Booth 关于英国发展情况的最新进展,“历史认知:英国视角”,《教育心理学家》 (1994),61–70,以及 Peter Lee 的著作。“英国历史教育研究:示意图评述”论文发表于 1999 年新奥尔良举行的美国教育研究协会年会。

60. Martin B. Booth, “Skills, Concepts, and Attitudes: The Development of Adolescent Children's Historical Thinking” History and Theory 22 (1983), 101–17. See Booth's update on developments in Great Britain, “Cognition in History: A British Perspective” Educational Psychologist (1994), 61–70, as well as Peter Lee, “History Education Research in the UK: A Schematic Commentary” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, 1999.

61. E. A. Peel,“理解学校教材”,教育评论》 24(1972),164。

61. E. A. Peel, “Understanding School Material” Educational Review 24 (1972), 164.

62.例如,E. A. Peel ,“历史教学心理学中的一些问题:历史思想和概念”,载于 W. H. Burston 和 D. Thompson 编,《历史的性质和教学研究》(伦敦,1967 年),第 159-172 页;以及 E. A. Peel,“历史教学心理学中的一些问题:学生的思维和推理”,同上,第 173-190 页。

62. For example, E. A. Peel, “Some Problems in the Psychology of History Teaching: Historical Ideas and Concepts” in W. H. Burston and D. Thompson, eds., Studies in the Nature and Teaching of History (London, 1967), 159–72; and E. A. Peel, “Some Problems in the Psychology of History Teaching: The Pupil's Thinking and Inference” ibid., 173–90.

63. Roy N. Hallam,“历史中的逻辑思维”,教育评论》 19(1967),183-202。

63. Roy N. Hallam, “Logical Thinking in History” Educational Review 19 (1967), 183–202.

64.例如,D. Case 和 J. M. Collinson,“语言理解中形式思维的发展”, 《英国教育心理学杂志》 32 (1962),103-11;参见 E. A. Peel,“对皮亚杰关于儿童感知和思维的一些图式的实验检验及其教育意义的讨论”,《英国教育心理学杂志》 29 (1959),89-103 中引用的其他研究。

64. For example, D. Case and J. M. Collinson, “The Development of Formal Thinking in Verbal Comprehension” British Journal of Educational Psychology 32 (1962), 103–11; see the references to other studies cited in E. A. Peel, “Experimental Examination of Some of Piaget's Schemata Concerning Children’ Perception and Thinking, and a Discussion of Their Educational Significance” British Journal of Educational Psychology 29 (1959), 89–103.

65. Hallam,“逻辑思维”195

65. Hallam, “Logical Thinking” 195.

66.同上

66. Ibid.

67.参见 Martin B. Booth,“年龄与概念:对皮亚杰历史教学方法的批判”,载于 Christopher Portal 编,《教师历史课程》(伦敦,1987 年),第 22-38 页。

67. See Martin B. Booth, “Ages and Concepts: A Critique of the Piagetian Approach to History Teaching” in Christopher Portal, ed., The History Curriculum for Teachers (London, 1987), 22–38.

68.引自 Booth,“技能、概念和态度”104

68. Quoted in Booth, “Skills, Concepts, and Attitudes” 104.

69. Roy N. Hallam,“皮亚杰与历史思维”,载于 M. Ballard 编,《历史研究与教学的新运动》伦敦,1970),第 168 页。Peter Lee 最近提醒我们,Hallam 的研究计划涵盖了历史思维和宗教思维,这一事实应该缓和我们对 Hallam 著作的批评。参见 Peter Lee,“跨越水域的历史:英国视角下的历史教育研究” ,《教育问题:教育心理学贡献》 4 (1998),第 211-220 页。

69. Roy N. Hallam, “Piaget and Thinking in History” in M. Ballard, ed., New Movements in the Study and Teaching of History (London, 1970), 168. Peter Lee has recently reminded us that Hallam's research program embraced both historical and religious thinking, a fact that should temper this critique of Hallam's work. See Peter Lee, “History Across the Water: A U.K. Perspective on History Education Research” Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology 4 (1998), 211–20.

70. Margaret F. Jurd,“历史类材料中的青少年思维”,《澳大利亚教育杂志》 17 (1973),2-17;以及 Margaret F. Jurd,“历史类材料中操作性思维的实证研究”,载于 J. A. Keats、K. F. Collis 和 G. S. Halford 编,《认知发展:基于新皮亚杰方法的研究》(纽约,1978),315-48。

70. Margaret F. Jurd, “Adolescent Thinking in History-Type Material” Australian Journal of Education 17 (1973), 2–17; and Margaret F. Jurd, “An Empirical Study of Operational Thinking in History-Type Material” in J. A. Keats, K. F. Collis, and G. S. Halford, eds., Cognitive Development: Research Based on a Neo-Piagetian Approach (New York, 1978), 315–48.

71. Jurd ,“运营思维” 322。

71. Jurd, “Operational Thinking” 322.

72.同上

72. Ibid.

73.参见 James West Davidson 和 Mark Hamilton Lytle 的《事后:历史侦查的艺术》(纽约,1982 年);另见 J. H. Hexter 的《历史入门》纽约,1971 年)中对背景的广泛讨论。

73. See James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York, 1982); see also the extensive discussion of context in J. H. Hexter, The History Primer (New York, 1971).

74.参见伯纳德·贝林 (Bernard Bailyn) 的文章“历史学家工作的问题:评论”,载于西德尼·胡克 (Sidney Hook) 主编的《哲学与历史》(纽约,1963 年),第 93-101 页;以及路易斯· O·明克 ( Louis O. Mink ) 主编的《历史理解》(伊萨卡,纽约,1987 年)。

74. See Bernard Bailyn, “The Problems of the Working Historian: A Comment” in Sidney Hook, ed., Philosophy and History (New York, 1963), 93–101; and Louis O. Mink (Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann, eds.), Historical Understanding (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987).

75. Hallam,“逻辑思维”198

75. Hallam, “Logical Thinking” 198.

76. Henry G. Macintosh,“历史技能测试”,载于 Portal,教师历史课程》,第 184 页。

76. Henry G. Macintosh, “Testing Skills in History” in Portal, History Curriculum for Teachers, 184.

77. John Fines,“导论” ,载于 Denis Shemilt 编,《学校理事会 13-16 岁历史项目》(爱丁堡,1980 年),第 iii 页。Peter Lee 认为皮亚杰对英国历史教学的影响被夸大了。参见他的《跨越水域的历史》,第 211-220 页。

77. John Fines, “Introduction” in Denis Shemilt, ed., Schools Council History 13–16 Project (Edinburgh, 1980), iii. Peter Lee believes that Piaget's influence on British history teaching has been exaggerated. See his “History Across the Water” 211–20.

78. G. R. Elton,“我们应该教授什么样的历史?”载于 Ballard,《历史研究和教学的新运动

78. G. R. Elton, “What Sort of History Should We Teach?” in Ballard, New Movements in the Study and Teaching of History.

79. H. Dawson,引自 L. W. Rosenzweig 和 T. P. Weinland,“历史课程的新方向:20 世纪 80 年代的挑战”,历史教师》 19 (1986),263–77。

79. H. Dawson, cited in L. W. Rosenzweig and T. P. Weinland, “New Directions of the History Curriculum: A Challenge for the 1980s” History Teacher 19 (1986), 263–77.

80. Denis J. Shemilt,历史 13-16:评估研究》(爱丁堡,1980 年)。

80. Denis J. Shemilt, History 13–16: Evaluation Study (Edinburgh, 1980).

81. Paul H. Hirst,“博雅教育与知识的本质”,载于 R. S. Peters 编,《教育哲学》(牛津,1973 年),第 87-101 页。学校理事会的创始人也受到了杰罗姆·布鲁纳的《教育过程》 (马萨诸塞州剑桥,1961 年)中提出的“学科结构”概念的影响。

81. Paul H. Hirst, “Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge” in R. S. Peters, ed., Philosophy of Education (Oxford, 1973), 87–101. Schools Council founders were influenced as well by notions of “structure of the disciplines” as formulated in Jerome Bruner's Process of Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1961).

82. Denis J. Shemilt,“魔鬼的火车头”,历史与理论22 (1983),15。

82. Denis J. Shemilt, “The Devil's Locomotive” History and Theory 22 (1983), 15.

83. Shemilt,《历史》13-16页“配对”设计将一名学习新课程的学生与一名背景和能力相似、学习传统课程的学生配对。是心理学实验中常用的研究设计。

83. Shemilt, History 13–16. A “matched-pairs” design pairs a student in the new curriculum with a student similar in background and ability who has studied the traditional curriculum. It is a common research design in psychological experimentation.

84. Shemilt,“魔鬼的火车” 7。

84. Shemilt, “Devil's Locomotive” 7.

85. Shemilt,历史 13–16》,第 20 页。

85. Shemilt, History 13–16, 20.

86.同上,第14页

86. Ibid., 14.

87.罚款,“引言” ii.

87. Fines, “Introduction” ii.

88. Shemilt,历史》13-16,50-52

88. Shemilt, History 13–16, 50–52.

89.参见 Matt T. Downey 和 Linda S. Levstik 的文章“历史的教学与学习”,载于 James P. Shaver 主编的《社会研究手册》纽约,1991 年),第 400-410 页。

89. See Matt T. Downey and Linda S. Levstik, “Teaching and Learning History” in James P. Shaver, ed., Handbook of Research on Social Studies (New York, 1991), 400–410.

90. Shemilt,历史》13-16,14

90. Shemilt, History 13–16, 14.

91.同上,第 76 页

91. Ibid., 76.

92.同上

92. Ibid.

93.霍华德·加德纳通常被认为是“认知革命”一词的发明者。参见他在《心灵的新科学:认知革命史》(纽约,1985 年)中对从行为主义到认知主义的过渡历史的通俗易懂的描述。

93. Howard Gardner is generally credited with inventing the term “cognitive revolution.” See his readable history of the transition from behaviorism to cognitivism in The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York, 1985).

94. Ellen D. Gagné,《学校学习的认知心理学》波士顿,1985 年)。

94. Ellen D. Gagné, The Cognitive Psychology of School Learning (Boston, 1985).

95. Gustav Jahoda,“儿童的时间和历史概念”,《教育评论》 15(1963),87-104;R. N. Smith 和 P. Tomlinson,“儿童历史持续性建构的发展”,教育研究》 19(1977),163-170。另见 Downey 和 Levstik,“历史的教与学”,400-410。

95. Gustav Jahoda, “Children's Concepts of Time and History” Educational Review 15 (1963), 87–104; R. N. Smith and P. Tomlinson, “The Development of Children's Construction of Historical Duration” Educational Research 19 (1977), 163–70. See also Downey and Levstik, “Teaching and Learning History” 400–410.

96. Gail M. Sinatra、Isabel L. Beck 和 Margaret G. McKeown,“对年轻学生了解本国政府的纵向特征描述”,美国教育研究杂志》 29(1992 年),633-62。

96. Gail M. Sinatra, Isabel L. Beck, and Margaret G. McKeown, “A Longitudinal Characterization of Young Student's Knowledge of Their Country’ Government” American Educational Research Journal 29 (1992), 633–62.

97. Bruce VanSledright 和 Jere Brophy,“儿童历史重建中的故事讲述、想象力和奇幻的阐述”,美国教育研究杂志》 29(1992),837-61。

97. Bruce VanSledright and Jere Brophy, “Storytelling, Imagination, and Fanciful Elaboration in Children's Historical Reconstructions” American Educational Research Journal 29 (1992), 837–61.

98.同上,第 846 页

98. Ibid., 846.

99. Hayden White,《元历史:十九世纪欧洲的历史想象》巴尔的摩,马里兰州,1973 年)。

99. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore, Md., 1973).

100. David N. Perkins 和 R. Simmons,“误解的模式:科学、数学和编程的综合模型”,教育研究评论》 58 (1988),303-26。

100. David N. Perkins and R. Simmons, “Patterns of Misunderstanding: An Integrative Model for Science, Math, and Programming” Review of Educational Research 58 (1988), 303–26.

101. Rosalyn Ashby 和 Peter J. Lee,“儿童对历史的同理心和理解的概念”,载于 Portal,教师历史课程》,第 62-88 页。

101. Rosalyn Ashby and Peter J. Lee, “Children's Concepts of Empathy and Understanding in History” in Portal, History Curriculum for Teachers, 62–88.

102.参见 Alaric K. Dickinson 和 Peter J. Lee 合著的历史教学与历史理解》(伦敦,1978 年);以及 Alaric K. Dickinson 和 Peter J. Lee 合著的《理解历史》,载于 Dickinson、Lee 和 Rogers 合编的《学习历史》,第 117-154 页。Peter Lee、Rosalyn Ashby 和 Alaric Dickinson 发起了一项关于儿童历史推理的重要研究。参见 Peter Lee、Alaric Dickinson 和 Rosalyn Ashby 合著的《又一位皇帝:理解过去的行动》,载于《国际教育研究杂志》 27 (1997),第 233-244 页。

102. See Alaric K. Dickinson and Peter J. Lee, History Teaching and Historical Understanding (London, 1978); and Alaric K. Dickinson and Peter J. Lee, “Making Sense of History” in Dickinson, Lee, and Rogers, Learning History, 117–54. Peter Lee, Rosalyn Ashby, and Alaric Dickinson have launched a major study into children's historical reasoning. See Peter Lee, Alaric Dickinson, and Rosalyn Ashby, “Just Another Emperor: Understanding Action in the Past” International Journal of Educational Research 27 (1997), 233–44.

103. Ashby和 Lee,“儿童概念” 63。

103. Ashby and Lee, “Children's Concepts” 63.

104.同上,第68页

104. Ibid., 68.

105. David Lowenthal,“永恒的过去:一些英美历史先入之见”,美国历史杂志》75(1989),1263-80。

105. David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Preconceptions” Journal of American History 75 (1989), 1263–80.

106.例如,Bonnie J. F. Meyer 《散文的组织及其对记忆的影响》(纽约,1975 年);以及 T. A. van Dijk 和 Walter Kintsch,《话语理解策略》(纽约,1983 年)。

106. For example, Bonnie J. F. Meyer, The Organization of Prose and Its Effects on Memory (New York, 1975); and T. A. van Dijk and Walter Kintsch, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (New York, 1983).

107. Bonnie B. Armbruster 和 Tom H. Anderson,“历史教科书中的解释结构,或者如果斯坦福州长错过了钉道钉并撞上了铁轨又会怎样?”课程研究杂志16 (1984),247–74。

107. Bonnie B. Armbruster and Tom H. Anderson, “Structures of Explanations in History Textbooks, or So What If Governor Stanford Missed the Spike and Hit the Rail?” Journal of Curriculum Studies 16 (1984), 247–74.

108.同上,第 249 页

108. Ibid., 249.

109. Isabel L. Beck、Margaret G. McKeown 和 Erika W. Gromoll ,“从社会研究文本中学习”认知与教学6 (1989),99-158。

109. Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Erika W. Gromoll, “Learning from Social Studies Texts” Cognition and Instruction 6 (1989), 99–158.

110. Isabel L. Beck、Margaret G. McKeown、Gail M. Sinatra 和 J. A. Loxterman,“从文本处理的角度修改社会研究文本:提高可理解性的证据”,阅读研究季刊》 26 (1991),251–76。

110. Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, Gail M. Sinatra, and J. A. Loxterman, “Revising Social Studies Texts from a Text-Processing Perspective: Evidence of Improved Comprehensibility” Reading Research Quarterly 26 (1991), 251–76.

111.同上,第 257 页

111. Ibid., 257.

112. Margaret G. McKeown、Isabel L. Beck、Gail M. Sinatra 和 J. A. Loxterman,“先前知识和连贯文本对理解贡献”阅读研究季刊27 (1992),79-93。

112. Margaret G. McKeown, Isabel L. Beck, Gail M. Sinatra, and J. A. Loxterman, “The Contribution of Prior Knowledge and Coherent Text to Comprehension” Reading Research Quarterly 27 (1992), 79–93.

113. Avon Crismore,“教科书的修辞:元话语”,课程研究杂志》16(1984),279-96。

113. Avon Crismore, “The Rhetoric of Textbooks: Metadiscourse” Journal of Curriculum Studies 16 (1984), 279–96.

114.参见 Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. 的《揭开历史权威的神秘面纱:课堂中的批判性文本分析》,载于《美国历史学会通讯》 26(1988 年 2 月),第 13-16 页;Carl N. Degler 的《重塑美国历史》,载于《美国历史杂志》 67(1980 年),第 7-25 页;James L. Lorence 的《文献证据的批判性分析:历史课堂中的基本技能》,载于《历史教学:方法杂志》 8(1983 年),第 77-84 页。

114. See expansions of this point in Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “Demystifying Historical Authority: Critical Textual Analysis in the Classroom” Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 26 (February 1988), 13–16; Carl N. Degler, “Remaking American History” Journal of American History 67 (1980), 7–25; James L. Lorence, “The Critical Analysis of Documentary Evidence: Basic Skills in the History Classroom” History Teaching: A Journal of Methods 8 (1983), 77–84.

115. J. D. McNeil,“社会研究文本的个人意义与考试驱动的反应”,阅读心理学》10(1989),311-19。

115. J. D. McNeil, “Personal Meanings Versus Test-Driven Responses to Social Studies Texts” Reading Psychology 10 (1989), 311–19.

116. Crismore,“教科书的修辞”,第296页。理查德·J·帕克斯顿启动了一项研究项目,旨在考察学生对更接近真实历史写作的教科书的反应。参见理查德·J·帕克斯顿,“‘有人与《如人生如书:可见作者对高中历史学生的影响》教育心理学杂志89 (1997),235–50;以及 Richard J. Paxton,“震耳欲聋的沉默:历史教科书和阅读它们的学生”教育研究评论69 (1999),315–39。

116. Crismore, “Rhetoric of Textbooks” 296. Richard J. Paxton has begun a research program that examines how students respond to textbooks that better approximate authentic historical writing. See Richard J. Paxton, “'someone with Like a Life Wrote It's: The Effects of a Visible Author on High School History Students” Journal of Educational Psychology 89 (1997), 235–50; and Richard J. Paxton, “A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read Them” Review of Educational Research 69 (1999), 315–39.

117. Barak Rosenshine,“教学内容中未解决的问题:对联邦党人文集第 10 号课程的批判”,教学与教师教育》2(1986 年),301-8。

117. Barak Rosenshine, “Unsolved Issues in Teaching Content: A Critique of a Lesson on Federalist Paper No. 10” Teaching and Teacher Education 2 (1986), 301–8.

118. Lee S. Shulman,“教学研究的范式和研究计划:当代视角”,载于 Merlin Wittrock 编,《教学研究手册》第 3 版(纽约,1986 年),第 3-36 页。

118. Lee S. Shulman, “Paradigms and Research Programs in the Study of Teaching: A Contemporary Perspective” in Merlin Wittrock, ed., Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd ed. (New York, 1986), 3–36.

119. Gaea Leinhardt,“数学教学中的专业知识”,《教育领导》 43(1986),28-33;Gaea Leinhardt 和 James G. Greeno,“教学的认知技能”,《教育心理学杂志》 78 (1986),75-95。

119. Gaea Leinhardt, “Expertise in Mathematics Teaching” Educational Leadership 43 (1986), 28–33; Gaea Leinhardt and James G. Greeno, “The Cognitive Skill of Teaching” Journal of Educational Psychology 78 (1986), 75–95.

120. Gaea Leinhardt,“在历史中编织教学解释”,英国教育心理学杂志》63(1993),46-74。

120. Gaea Leinhardt, “Weaving Instructional Explanations in History” British Journal of Educational Psychology 63 (1993), 46–74.

121.自这篇评论最初发表以来,盖亚·莱因哈特撰写了数篇关于熟练历史教学的重要分析文章。例如,参见凯瑟琳·M·杨和盖亚·莱因哈特合著《从原始文献中写作:一种历史认知方式》,载于《书面交流》 15(1998),第25-68页;以及盖亚·莱因哈特的《从保罗的笔下汲取历史教学经验》,载于彼得·N·斯特恩斯、彼得·塞克斯和萨姆·温伯格主编的《认识、教学和学习历史:国家和国际视角》(纽约:2000),第223-245页。

121. Since the original publication of this review, Gaea Leinhardt has written several important analyses of skilled history teaching. See, for example, Kathleen M. Young and Gaea Leinhardt, “Writing from Primary Documents: A Way of Knowing in History” Written Communication 15 (1998), 25–68; and Gaea Leinhardt, “Lessons in Teaching and Learning History from Paul's Pen” in Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: 2000), 223–45.

122. Robert K. Merton,《社会理论与社会结构,第3版(纽约,1968年)。

122. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 3rd ed. (New York, 1968).

123.例如,参见布拉德利学校历史委员会,《构建历史课程:学校历史教学指南》(华盛顿特区,1988年);加州教育部,《加州公立学校K-12历史-社会科学框架》(萨克拉门托,1988年);伯纳德·R·吉福德, 《学校历史》(纽约,1988年)。关于近期一项探讨复杂文本解读的研究,参见琼·佩斯金,《阅读诗歌时的意义建构:一项专家-新手研究》,载《认知与教学》 16(1998年),第235-263页。

123. For example, Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools (Washington, D.C., 1988); California State Department of Education, History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools, K-12 (Sacramento, 1988); Bernard R. Gifford, History in the Schools (New York, 1988). For a recent example of research that examines sophisticated textual interpretation, see Joan Peskin, “Constructing Meaning When Reading Poetry: An Expert-Novice Study” Cognition and Instruction 16 (1998), 235–63.

124.参见 I. Athey和 Harry Singer,“发展国家在技术时代的阅读潜力”,《哈佛教育评论》 57(1987),84-93;以及 Walter Kintsch,“从文本中学习”,《认知与教学》3(1986),87-108。

124. See I. Athey and Harry Singer, “Developing the Nation's Reading Potential for a Technological Era” Harvard Educational Review 57 (1987), 84–93; and Walter Kintsch, “Learning from Text” Cognition and Instruction 3 (1986), 87–108.

125.参见大卫·R·奥尔森《纸上的世界》(纽约,1994 年)。

125. See David R. Olson, The World on Paper (New York, 1994).

126.参见 E. B. Freeman 和 Linda S. Levstik,“重现过去:社会研究课程中的历史小说”,《小学杂志》 88 (1988),329–37;以及 Linda S. Levstik 和 Christine C. Pappas,“探索历史理解的发展”,教育研究与发展杂志》 21 (1987),1–15。

126. See E. B. Freeman and Linda S. Levstik, “Recreating the Past: Historical Fiction in the Social Studies Curriculum” Elementary School Journal 88 (1988), 329–37; and Linda S. Levstik and Christine C. Pappas, “Exploring the Development of Historical Understanding” Journal of Research and Development in Education 21 (1987), 1–15.

127.例如,汤姆·霍尔特,历史思维:叙事、想象和理解》(普林斯顿,1990 年);以及威廉·克罗农,“故事的场所:自然、历史和叙事”,《美国历史杂志》78(1992 年),1347-76。

127. For example, Tom Holt, Thinking Historically: Narrative, Imagination, and Understanding (Princeton, 1990); and William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” Journal of American History 78 (1992), 1347–76.

128.例如,Jon Nichol 和 J. Dean,“计算机与儿童的历史思维和理解”,载于 R. Ennals、R. Gwyn 和 L. Zdravchev 编,《信息技术与教育:变革中的学校》(英国西萨塞克斯郡,1986 年),第 160-176 页;Gavriel Salomon,“超越定性与定量之争:教育研究的分析与系统方法”,《教育研究者》 20 (1991), 10–18;以及 Katheryn T. Spoehr 和 Luther W. Spoehr,“学习历史思维”,《教育心理学家》 29 (1994), 71–77。有关技术与历史之间关系的激动人心的发展,请参见http://historymatters.gmu.edu,以及​​ Randy Bass 和 Roy Rosenzweig 的“重塑历史和社会研究课堂:需求、框架、危险和建议”(美国教育部,华盛顿特区,1999 年)。

128. For example, Jon Nichol and J. Dean, “Computers and Children's Historical Thinking and Understanding” in R. Ennals, R. Gwyn, and L. Zdravchev, eds., Information Technology and Education: The Changing School (West Sussex, England, 1986), 160–76; Gavriel Salomon, “Transcending the Qualitative-Quantitative Debate: The Analytic and Systemic Approaches to Educational Research” Educational Researcher 20 (1991), 10–18; and Katheryn T. Spoehr and Luther W. Spoehr, “Learning to Think Historically” Educational Psychologist 29 (1994), 71–77. For exciting developments on the relationship between technology and history see http://historymatters.gmu.edu, as well as Randy Bass and Roy Rosenzweig, “Rewiring the History and Social Studies Classroom: Needs, Frameworks, Dangers, and Proposals” (U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., 1999).

129.参见 Martin B. Booth,“现代世界历史课程与青少年学生的思维”,《教育评论》 32 (1980),245–57。另见 Eva Baker,“基于学习的历史理解评估”,教育心理学家》 29,第2 期(1994 年春季),97–106。

129. See Martin B. Booth, “A Modern World History Course and the Thinking of Adolescent Pupils” Educational Review 32 (1980), 245–57. See also Eva Baker, “Learning-Based Assessments of History Understanding” Educational Psychologist 29, no. 2 (Spring 1994), 97–106.

130.例如,卡尔·贝克尔,《人人皆可成为历史学家》(芝加哥,1935年;1966年重印版);伯克霍弗,《揭秘》;马克·布洛赫,历史学家的技艺》(英国曼彻斯特,1954年);克罗农,《故事的容身之处》;戴维森和莱特尔,《事后》;德格勒,《重塑美国历史》;大卫·哈克特·费舍尔,《历史学家的谬误:走向历史思想的逻辑》 (纽约,1970年);路易斯·戈特沙尔克,《理解历史:历史方法入门》(芝加哥,1958年);赫克斯特,《历史入门》;艾伦·梅吉尔,《重述过去:史学中的“描述”、解释和叙事》,《美国历史评论》 94(1989年),627-53;诺维克,《高贵的梦想》; W. J. Dibble,“从文献推断事件的四种类型”,《历史与理论》 3 (1963),203–21;William H. Dray,《历史的哲学分析》(纽约,1966);Haskel Fain,《哲学与历史之间:分析传统中思辨历史哲学的复兴》(普林斯顿,1970);Maurice Mandelbaum,《历史知识问题》(纽约,1938);Mink(Fay、Golob 和 Vann 编),《历史理解》; Jörn Rüsen,《元历史研究》(南非比勒陀利亚:人文科学研究委员会,1993);Quentin Skinner 编,《人文科学中宏大理论的回归》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1985);Michael Stanford,《历史知识的本质》(纽约,1986)。

130. For example, Carl Becker, Everyman His Own Historian (Chicago, 1935; reprint ed. 1966); Berkhofer, “Demystifying”; Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (Manchester, England, 1954); Cronon, “A Place for Stories”; Davidson and Lytle, After the Fact; Degler, “Remaking American History”; David Hackett Fischer, Historian's Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York, 1970); Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method (Chicago, 1958); Hexter, History Primer; Allan Megill, “Recounting the Past: ‘Description,’ Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography” American Historical Review 94 (1989), 627–53; Novick, Noble Dream; W. J. Dibble, “Four Types of Inferences from Documents to Event” History and Theory 3 (1963), 203–21; William H. Dray, Philosophical Analysis of History (New York, 1966); Haskel Fain, Between Philosophy and History: The Resurrection of Speculative Philosophy of History Within the Analytic Tradition (Princeton, 1970); Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge (New York, 1938); Mink (Fay, Golob, and Vann, eds.), Historical Understanding; Jörn Rüsen, Studies in Metahistory (Pretoria, South Africa: Human Sciences Research Council, 1993); Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Michael Stanford, The Nature of Historical Knowledge (New York, 1986).

131.参见 K. Anders Ericsson 和 Herbert A. Simon,协议分析:口头报告作为数据》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1984 年);Jill Larkin,“在物理学中教授问题解决:心理实验室和实践课堂”,载于 David T. Tuma 和 F. Reif 编,《问题解决与教育:教学和研究中的问题》(新泽西州希尔斯代尔,1980 年),第 111-125 页。

131. See K. Anders Ericsson and Herbert A. Simon, Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); Jill Larkin, “Teaching Problem Solving in Physics: The Psychological Laboratory and the Practical Classroom” in David T. Tuma and F. Reif, eds., Problem Solving and Education: Issues in Teaching and Research (Hillsdale, N.J., 1980), 111–25.

132.参见注释2

132. See note 2.

133.参见 Kenneth A. Strike 和 George J. Posner,“课程组织和学习概念的认识论视角”,载于 Lee S. Shulman 编,《教育研究评论》(伊利诺伊州伊塔斯卡,1976 年),第 10-141 页。

133. See Kenneth A. Strike and George J. Posner, “Epistemological Perspectives on Conceptions of Curriculum Organization and Learning” in Lee S. Shulman, ed., Review of Research in Education (Itasca, Ill., 1976), 10–141.

134.参见 Geraldine M. Joncich, 《理智的实证主义者:爱德华·L·桑代克传记(康涅狄格州米德尔敦,1968 年)。

134. See Geraldine M. Joncich, The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike (Middletown, Conn., 1968).

135.例如,埃德温·G·博林, 《实验心理学史》(纽约,1929 年)。

135. For example, Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York, 1929).

136. M. G. Ash,“威廉·冯特和奥斯瓦尔德·库尔佩论心理学的制度地位:历史背景下的学术争论”,载于 W. G. Bringmann 和 R. D. Tweney 编,《冯特研究》(多伦多,1980 年),第 396-421 页;史蒂文·图尔明和大卫·E·利里,“心理学及其他领域的经验主义崇拜”,载于大卫·E ·利里和 S. Koch 编,《心理学作为科学的一个世纪》(纽约,1985 年),第 594-617 页。

136. M. G. Ash, “Wilhelm Wundt and Oswald Kulpe on the Institutional Status of Psychology: An Academic Controversy in Historical Context” in W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney, eds., Wundt Studies (Toronto, 1980), 396–421; Steven Toulmin and David E. Leary, “The Cult of Empiricism in Psychology, and Beyond” in David E. Leary and S. Koch, eds., A Century of Psychology as Science (New York, 1985), 594–617.

II

学生面临的挑战

CHALLENGES FOR THE STUDENT

3

3

论历史文本的阅读

On the Reading of Historical Texts

关于学校与学院之间裂痕的说明

Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy

在一篇关于阅读历史文本的文章中,威廉·威尔科克斯要求我们考虑攻占巴士底狱的两种说法,一种是旧制度成员的说法,另一种是雅各宾派的说法:

In an essay about reading historical texts, William Willcox asks us to consider two accounts of the storming of the Bastille, one by a member of the ancien régime and the other by a Jacobin:

无论这两个人多么诚实,他们各自描述的事件都带有截然不同的色彩。正如兰克的名言“ wie es eigentlich gewesen”(意为“亲眼所见”),历史学家永远无法亲眼目睹事件本身;他只能通过目击者的视角来了解事件,并且既依赖于他们的笔,也依赖于他们的观察和情感。这并非意味着历史学家必须认同他们的偏见;恰恰相反。但他必须理解这种偏见,才能允许它的存在

No matter how honest the two men may have been, the event described by one has a quite different flavor from that described by the other. The historian can never see the event itself, in Ranke's famous phrase, wie es eigentlich gewesen; he can see it only through witnesses, and is as dependent on their eyes and emotions as on their pens. This is not to say that he must share their bias; quite the contrary. But he must understand it in order to allow for it.1

在历史学家的反思性著述中, “理解史料的偏见”这一呼吁十分常见。然而,作为一个群体,历史学家们却一反常态地对他们如何做到这一点讳莫如深。²这令人遗憾,因为这个过程绝非不言而喻。历史学家究竟是如何将情感重新注入他们所阅读的冰冷文本中的?他们如何赋予那些已逝数百年甚至数千年的人们以声音?而对于历史专业的学生来说,历史文本通常就是教科书,他们又该如何理解呢?他们是否能够参与到这种文本的“活化”过程中?学生们是否意识到,他们不仅依赖于作者的理性思考,也同样依赖于作者的情感?

The call to “understand the bias” of a source is quite common in the reflective writings of historians. Yet as a guild, historians have been uncharacteristically tight-lipped about how they do so.2 This is unfortunate, for the process is by no means self-evident. How exactly do historians put emotion back into the inanimate texts that they read? How do they provide voices to people who have been dead hundreds or thousands of years? And what about students of history, for whom a historical text is most often a textbook? Are they capable of engaging in this form of textual animation? Do students realize that they are as dependent on author's hearts as on their heads?

在提出这些问题时,我借鉴了我对历史学家和高中生的研究成果。这些高中生在阅读一系列历史文献时进行了“思考分享”。首先,我概述了我从历史学家那里了解到的信息,并大致勾勒出一位熟练的历史读者的形象。接下来,我将这一形象与高中生对这些文献的反应分析结果进行比较。然后,我推测历史学家和学生之间差异的根源。最后,我概述了这项研究对我们如何定义历史在学校课程中的地位的一些启示。

In asking these questions I draw on my research with historians and high school students who “thought aloud” as they reviewed a series of historical documents. I begin by providing an overview of what I learned from historians, sketching in broad strokes an image of the skilled reader of history. Next, I compare this image to what emerged from an analysis of high school student's responses to these same documents. I then speculate about the source of differences between historians and students. I end by outlining some of the implications of this work for how we define the place of history in the school curriculum.

熟练地解读历史

THE SKILLED READING OF HISTORY

首先,我想解释一下我是如何与历史学家和学生一起进行阅读的。我与八位历史学家坐下来,教他们一边阅读有关列克星顿战役(美国独立战争的开端)的文献,一边进行“思考出声”练习。(我也对八位高中生采用了同样的方法,但稍后会详细介绍。)“思考出声”技巧要求人们在解决复杂问题或阅读晦涩文本时,将自己的想法用语言表达出来。它与实验研究的不同之处在于,它关注的是认知过程的中间环节,而不仅仅是最终结果。此外,“思考出声”与它已被摒弃的前身——内省法——有两个不同之处:首先,它要求人们在记忆中立即记录下自己的想法,而不是几分钟或几天之后;其次,它要求人们表达的是想法的内容,而不是产生这些想法的过程。

Let me begin by explaining how my readings with historians and students were generated. I sat down with eight historians and taught them to think aloud as they read documents about the Battle of Lexington, the opening volley of the Revolutionary War. (The same procedure was followed for eight high school students, but more about them later.) The think-aloud technique asks people to verbalize their thoughts as they solve complex problems or read sophisticated texts. It departs from experimental research by focusing on the intermediate processes of cognition, not just on its outcomes. Moreover, thinking aloud differs from its discredited ancestor, introspection, in two ways: First, it asks people to report their thoughts as they are heeded in memory, not minutes or days later; and, second, it asks people to verbalize the contents of their thoughts, not the processes used to generate them.3

我特意招募了不同专业和背景的历史学家。 4有些历史学家对殖民时期历史颇有研究,但另一些历史学家,例如日本历史专家和中世纪史专家,对革命的了解仅限于高中时的记忆。我收集的文本也同样丰富多样,从目击者的记述和报纸文章,到历史研究中鲜少涉及的材料,例如学校教科书中的一段文字和一部历史小说。 5除了要求历史学家们进行思考并大声朗读之外,我还要求他们根据每份文献作为历史资料的可信度对其进行排名。

I purposely recruited historians with varied specialties and backgrounds.4 Some were steeped in the colonial period, but others, such as a specialist in Japanese history and a medievalist, knew little more about the Revolution than what they remembered from high school. The texts I assembled were similarly varied, from eyewitness accounts and newspaper articles to materials rarely considered in historical research, such as a passage from a school textbook and a piece of historical fiction.5 In addition to asking historians to think aloud, I asked them to rank each document in terms of its trustworthiness as a historical source.

第一份文本为他们接下来要阅读的七份文件奠定了基础。这是一封1775年4月28日由马萨诸塞省议会主席约瑟夫·沃伦写给殖民地驻伦敦代表本杰明·富兰克林的信。莱克星顿流血事件发生后,沃伦收集了目击者的证词,并附上了一封信。他写了信,并将包裹寄给了富兰克林。在信中,他将列克星顿事件描述为“政府对马萨诸塞湾殖民地的报复,因为该殖民地拒绝与其他殖民地一起屈服于奴隶制。” 6 杰克是一位精通殖民时期美洲原住民历史的专家,他读到这句话后评论道:

The first text set the stage for the other seven documents they would read. This was a letter sent on April 28, 1775, by Joseph Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, to Benjamin Franklin, the colonist's representative in London. After the bloodshed at Lexington, Warren assembled depositions from eyewitnesses, attached a cover letter, and sent the bundle off to Franklin. In his letter, he characterized the events at Lexington as “marks of ministerial vengeance against [Massachusetts-Bay] for refusing with her sister colonies a submission to slavery.”6 Jack, a specialist in Native American history well versed in the colonial period, read this sentence and remarked:

我想到的是拉科夫7号写的一本书,书中谈到当时面临的问题之一是如何让各个殖民地团结起来,努力实现某种程度的统一。所以,她“拒绝与姐妹殖民地一起行动”某种程度上是对其他群体的一种呼吁。

What I think of is a book I read by Rakove7 talking about how one of the problems at the time was getting the colonies to hang together, and to try to get some unity. So the “refusing with her sister colonies” is kind of an appeal to the other groups.

这段评论的微妙之处很容易被忽略。首先,这并非是对历史学家所读文本的字面解读,因为文本中并未提及殖民地之间的不和或分裂。此外,尽管将这封信视为“呼吁”似乎合情合理,但该信是寄给富兰克林,由他分发给议会成员,因此其呼吁的直接对象是英国。事实上,杰克在这里看到的并非文本本身,也无法用文本命题的图表来表示。对他而言,最重要的不是文本说了什么,而是文本做了什么。

The subtlety of this comment is easily missed. To begin, this is not a commentary on the literal text read by the historian, for there is nothing in the text about discord or disunity among the colonies. Furthermore, while it might make sense to see the letter as an “appeal” the letter was sent to Franklin for circulation among members of Parliament, so the appeal is literally directed to Great Britain. Indeed, what Jack sees here cannot be found on the page or represented in a diagram of textual propositions. What is most important to him is not what the text says, but what it does.

那么,根据杰克的说法,这段文字的作用是什么呢?首先,它将列克星顿的冲突描绘成一场意义极其重大的事件,而非紧张的农民和疲惫的士兵之间的小争执——国王代表与北美十三殖民地代表之间的生死之战。“拒绝与姐妹殖民地同流合污”这句话具有双重含义:它为人们理解八名士兵的死亡提供了一个框架,同时也呼吁巴尔的摩或萨凡纳的读者(这份文件也会传阅到这些地方)将自己的命运与北方的同胞们紧紧联系在一起。换句话说,这份“呼吁”的目的不仅在于煽动伦敦的情绪,也在于鼓舞国内的士气。

And what does the text do, according to Jack? First of all, it casts the confrontation at Lexington not as a minor squabble between nervous farmers and tired soldiers, but as a meeting of the broadest import—a fateful clash between representatives of the king and those of the thirteen American colonies. The phrase “refusing with her sister colonies” carries a dual purpose: It provides a frame in which to view the deaths of eight men, and it asks readers in Baltimore or Savannah (to whom this document would also be circulated) to bind their own fates to their northern cousins. In other words, this “appeal” was only partly designed to stir passions in London; it was also intended to rally the forces at home.

这位历史学家理解的并非字面文本,甚至也不是通常意义上的推断文本,而是潜文本,即隐藏的、潜在的含义。历史文献的潜文本可以分为两个既独立又相互关联的领域:作为修辞工具的文本和作为人为产物的文本。在第一个领域,即作为修辞工具的文本中,历史学家试图重构作者的目的、意图和目标。但潜文本的意义远不止于重构作者的意图,也远不止于将语言作为一种说服的语言技巧。事实上,许多潜文本包含与作者意图相悖的元素,从而揭示出更深层次的含义。作者可能并未意识到或有意隐瞒某些信念。这些方面属于第二个范畴,即文本作为一种人类产物,它构建现实并揭示作者的假设、世界观和信仰。这种解读方式从作者使用的词语跃升至作者本身,将文本视为构建世界的方式,而非描述世界的方式。

It is not the literal text, or even the inferred text (as that word is commonly used), that this historian comprehends, but the subtext, a text of hidden and latent meanings. Subtexts of historical documents can be divided into two distinct but related spheres: the text as a rhetorical artifact and the text as a human artifact. In the first sphere, the text as a rhetorical artifact, historians try to reconstruct author's purposes, intentions, and goals. But the subtext goes beyond a reconstruction of the author's intentions, beyond the use of language as a linguistic technology for persuasion. In fact, many subtexts include elements that work at cross-purposes with author's intentions, bringing to the surface convictions authors may have been unaware of or may have wished to conceal. These aspects fall into the second sphere, the text as a human artifact that frames reality and discloses information about its author's assumptions, world view, and beliefs. Such a reading leaps from the words authors use to the types of people authors are, a reading that sees texts not as ways to describe the world but as ways to construct it.

让我们回到杰克对沃伦信的解读。他需要了解哪些信息才能将这封信视为对其他殖民地的呼吁?当然,他需要了解美国独立战争的二手文献——事实上,他引用了历史学家杰克·拉科夫的专著。但我研究的八位历史学家中,有些人缺乏如此详尽的知识,无法识别萨拉托加战役、虚拟代表制、汤森法案、1763年公告和内部税收——这些都是美国历史教科书章节评述中的常见知识点识别题,也是我作为一项任务给历史学家出的简短测验的一部分。然而即使在这些“知识较少”的历史学家中,我们也看到他们在解读文献时采用了相同的总体方法,尽管具体程度有所不同。例如,中世纪史学家弗雷德对沃伦的信作出了如下评论:

Let's return to Jack's reading of the Warren letter. What did he need to know in order to see this letter as an appeal to the other colonies? To be sure, he needed to know the secondary literature of the Revolution—in fact, he quotes a monograph by the historian Jack Rakove. But some of the eight historians I studied lacked such detailed knowledge and could not identify the Battle of Saratoga, virtual representation, the Townshend Acts, the Proclamation of 1763, and internal taxation—stock identification questions in a chapter review of a U.S. history textbook and part of a short quiz I gave to historians as part of the task.8 Yet even among these “less knowledgeable” historians, we see the same general approach, if not the same specificity, in how they read documents. For example, Fred, the medievalist, made this comment on Warren's letter:

这是一种试图让英国民众接受他们观点的方式;它鼓励民众效忠国王,但同时也指出政府犯了错误。它清楚地表明,正规军应对列克星顿的暴行负责……这不仅仅是对事件的重述,它实际上是从王室与其政府的关系角度来解读事件的,而这两者是截然不同的。

It's a way to try and get people in England to see things their way; it's encouraging loyalty to the king but it's saying the government has messed up. It clearly shows that the Regular troops are guilty of the violence at Lexington…. It's not just a recapitulation of events, but it in fact frames events in terms of…the relationship of the crown to its government, and these are two different things.

尽管弗雷德缺乏事实知识(他只回答了三分之一的辨认问题),但他的解读与那些知识更渊博的同事们的解读却极为相似。在弗雷德看来,这份文件不仅仅是对事件的客观描述,而是试图“影响人们的观点”,以安抚他们,让他们相信,尽管莱克星顿发生了流血事件,殖民地居民仍然“效忠国王”。9这种解读下,这封信从王室与其政府的关系角度“构建”了事件,殖民地居民一方面效忠于前者,另一方面又谴责后者的政策。换句话说,沃伦的信通过将罪责归咎于国王的任命官员,从而为国王开脱了罪责。

Despite his lack of factual knowledge (he answered only a third of the identification questions), Fred's reading bears a strong likeness to that of his more knowledgeable colleagues. For Fred, the document goes beyond a neutral description of events and attempts to “affect people's opinions” to reassure them that, despite the bloodshed at Lexington, the colonists still pledge “allegiance to the king.”9 In this reading, the letter “frames events” in terms of the relationship of the crown to its government, with the colonists pledging loyalty to the former while indicting the policies of the latter. In other words, Warren's letter absolves the king by laying the guilt at the feet of his appointees.

在这两种解读中,字面文本仅仅是历史学家所理解文本的外壳。文本并非为了传递信息、讲述故事,甚至也不是为了澄清事实。相反,它们难以捉摸、含糊不清、变化莫测,反映了现实世界的不确定性和虚伪性。文本以“言语行为”的形式出现,即记录了10种社会互动。纸上文字的意义,只有通过重构其发生的社会背景才能理解。对文本的理解超越了词语和短语本身,涵盖了意图、动机、目的和计划——这些概念与我们用来解读人类行为的概念相同。

In both of these readings, the literal text is only the shell of the text comprehended by historians. Texts come not to convey information, to tell stories, or even to set the record straight. Instead, they are slippery, cagey, and protean, reflecting the uncertainty and disingenuity of the real world. Texts emerge as “speech acts,”10 social interactions set down on paper that can be understood only by reconstructing the social context in which they occurred. The comprehension of text reaches beyond words and phrases to embrace intention, motive, purpose, and plan—the same set of concepts we use to decipher human action.

阅读学校课本

THE READING OF SCHOOL TEXTS

将文本视为言语行为的观点或许适用于我提供给历史学家的原始资料,但学​​校教材又该如何解释呢?表面上看,这类文本与这些历史学家审阅的那些明显带有论战色彩的文献截然不同。学校教材的编写目的在于让学生能够阅读并记住其中的信息,因此似乎属于不同的范畴,不太适合进行文本深层解读。为了验证这一点,我让历史学家阅读了以下摘自美国历史教科书的段落:

The view of texts as speech acts may apply to the primary sources I gave historians, but what about school texts? On the surface, such texts are worlds apart from the patently polemical documents these historians reviewed. It would seem that the school text, written so that students can read and retain the information it contains,11 falls into a different category and would be less amenable to subtextual readings. To test this, I had historians read the following excerpt from an American history textbook:

1775年4月,马萨诸塞州军事总督盖奇将军派遣一支部队前往波士顿附近的康科德,占领那里的军需品。在莱克星顿,几名得到保罗·里维尔通风报信的“坚守阵地的农民”挡住了英军的去路。“叛军”被命令解散,但他们坚守阵地。英军开火,八名爱国者被打死。不久之后,骑着骏马的保罗·里维尔便将这起暴行的消息传到了邻近的殖民地。新英格兰各地的爱国者,虽然人数仍然不多,但都已准备好与英军作战。甚至在遥远的北卡罗来纳州,爱国者们也组织起来抵抗英军

In April 1775, General Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts, sent out a body of troops to take possession of military stores at Concord, a short distance from Boston. At Lexington, a handful of “embattled farmers” who had been tipped off by Paul Revere, barred the way. The “rebels” were ordered to disperse. They stood their ground. The English fired a volley of shots that killed eight patriots. It was not long before the swift-riding Paul Revere spread the news of this new atrocity to the neighboring colonies. The patriots of all of New England, although still a handful, were now ready to fight the English. Even in faraway North Carolina, patriots organized to resist them.12

当被要求对这八份文件的可信度进行排名时,历史学家们将这段摘录排在最后,甚至比霍华德·法斯特的小说《四月清晨》中的一段摘录还要不可信。这并非没有道理,因为上述段落与英美双方的第一手资料都相矛盾,双方都没有将民兵描述为“坚守阵地”或“阻挡道路”。然而,除了指出这段记载的事实矛盾之外,历史学家们还对其潜在含义进行了复杂的解读。弗雷德对这段文字的评论颇具代表性:“(这段摘录)夸大了我们这边发动战争的人们的英雄气概和决心。他们消息灵通,骑着快马,坚守阵地。”

When asked to rank the relative trustworthiness of the eight documents, historians ranked this excerpt dead last, even less trustworthy than an excerpt from Howard Fast's novel April Morning. And for good reason, since the above passage contradicts primary accounts from both British and American sides, neither of which portrays the minutemen as “standing their ground” or “barring the way.” But beyond noting the factual inconsistencies of this account, historians constructed elaborate subtexts of its latent meaning. Fred's comment on this passage was fairly representative: “[The excerpt] aggrandizes the heroism and resolve of the people who begin the war on our side. They are informed, they ride fast horses, and they stand their ground.”

学生的回答呈现出不同的趋势。首先需要指出的是,这八名学生并非普通学生。他们的SAT平均分高达1227分,远高于全国大学预科生的平均水平。他们的平均绩点(GPA)同样优异,平均分为3.5,其中两名学生保持了优异的成绩。满分4.0。此外,与同龄人相比,这些学生掌握了丰富的历史知识。他们都学习了四年历史课程,并且在全国教育进步评估(NAEP)历史考试中,所有学生的得分都显著高于全国平均水平。 13 简而言之,这些学生代表了我们教育体系的成功。

Student's responses followed a different course. I should begin by noting that these eight students were no ordinary group. They had average SAT scores of 1227, well above the national average for college-bound seniors. Their grade point averages (GPAs) were equally distinguished, with a mean of 3.5, and with two of eight students maintaining a perfect 4.0. Moreover, these students, when compared with their peers, knew a lot of history. All had taken four years of history courses, and all scored significantly higher than a national sample on items from the history examination of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). 13 In short, these students represented the successes of our educational system.

14岁的德里克是一位雄心勃勃、即将进入大学的高三学生,他的回答颇具启发性。德里克保持着完美的4.0 GPA,SAT成绩为630分(阅读)和690分(数学),在我采访他时,他正在修读美国历史AP课程。在聆听并随后分析德里克对这些文件的阅读过程中,我惊讶地发现他很好地体现了教育文献中描述的优秀读者的诸多特征。他认真监控自己的理解,并运用阅读策略,例如在理解出现偏差时回溯阅读;他会在阅读每一段后停下来总结要点;并且他会尝试将阅读内容与自己已有的知识联系起来。尽管如此,德里克仍然认为他所阅读的八份文件中,教科书是最值得信赖的。尽管德里克拥有出色的阅读能力和深厚的史实知识,但他仍然认为教科书中的摘录“只是在陈述事实——‘叛军奉命解散,但他们坚守阵地。’简洁明了,有点像新闻报道,只是如实讲述了发生了什么。”这种反应并非个例。另一位学生则将教科书描述为“客观信息”,是对莱克星顿绿地事件的客观描述。对于这类学生而言,教科书而非目击者的证词,才是主要信息来源。

The responses of Derek,14 an ambitious college-bound senior, are illuminating. Derek maintained a perfect 4.0 GPA, scored 630 (verbal) and 690 (math) on his SAT, and was enrolled in an Advanced Placement American history course when I interviewed him. As I listened to and later analyzed Derek's reading of these documents, I was struck by how well he embodies many of the features of the good reader described in the education literature. He carefully monitors his comprehension and uses reading strategies such as backtracking when meaning breaks down; he pauses and formulates summaries after each paragraph; and he tries to connect the content of what he reads to what he already knows.15 Nonetheless, Derek rated the textbook as the most trustworthy of the eight documents he reviewed. Despite excellent reading skills and in-depth factual knowledge, Derek believed that the textbook excerpt was “just reporting the facts—‘The rebels were ordered to disperse. They stood their ground.’ Just concise, journalistic in a way, just saying what happened.” Nor was this response atypical. Another student characterized the textbook as “straight information,” a neutral account of the events at Lexington Green. For such students, the textbook, not the eyewitness accounts, emerged as the primary source.

总体而言,学生们在理解这些文献的主旨、预测接下来的内容、在文本中查找信息以及回答有关文本内容的字面理解和推断性问题方面几乎没有遇到困难。然而,在分析教科书时,很少有学生意识到将列克星顿事件贴上“暴行”的标签会歪曲事实,并引发人们将其与其他“暴行”(如纳粹大屠杀、美莱村大屠杀、柬埔寨大屠杀)联系起来。没有学生注意到“叛军”一词上的引号,也没有人推测作者使用引号的意图。学生们对“饱受战火蹂躏的农民”与乔治国王军队之间的对比缺乏敏感度,而这种对比迎合了我们同情弱者的倾向。与历史学家不同,没有学生注意到对殖民者描述的演变过程:他们从“饱受战火蹂躏的农民”到“叛军”,最终,在去掉引号后,变成了“爱国者”。没有学生注意到文本对第一枪的开火含糊其辞,但其结构却使得“‘叛军’……坚守阵地”和“英国人齐射”这两句话之间很容易看出因果关系。总之,学生们未能将文本视为一种精心设计的社会工具,以达到某种社会目的。

Overall students had little problem formulating the main idea of these documents, predicting what might come next, locating information in the text, and answering literal and inferential questions about the content of the text. When analyzing the textbook, however, few students recognized that labeling the encounter at Lexington as an “atrocity” slants events and sets off associations with other “atrocities”—the Holocaust, My Lai, Kampuchea. None accounted for the quotation marks bracketing the word “rebels” or speculated about the author's intentions in putting them there. Students displayed little sensitivity to the contrast drawn between the “embattled farmers” and the troops of King George, a contrast that appeals to our tendency to side with the underdog. Unlike historians, no student commented on the progression in the description of the colonists, who go from “embattled farmers” to “rebels” and finally, shedding their quotation marks, emerge as “patriots” No student noticed how the text hedges on the firing of the first shot, yet is constructed so that a causal relationship is easily perceived between the statements “The ‘rebel’…stood their ground” and “the English fired a volley of shots” In sum, students failed to see the text as a social instrument skillfully crafted to achieve a social end.

我们不应过分苛责学生,因为这些文本特征虽然对熟练阅读历史至关重要,但在学校课程或教育学、心理学领域关于阅读理解的文献中却鲜有提及。例如,一篇关于熟练阅读的文章提出了一个“理解失败分类法”,列举了阅读过程中可能出现的各种问题。作者列举了诸如无法理解单词、无法理解句子、无法理解句子之间的关系以及无法理解整篇文章的结构等问题。然而,文章却只字未提无法理解作者的意图、无法把握文本的论辩、无法识别词语的内涵(而不仅仅是外延)、无法将文本置于学科框架中,以及其他诸多在阅读历史文本时至关重要的问题。同样,当研究人员将目光聚焦于“理解监控”时,这些阅读方面也常常被忽视。由于熟练的阅读理解被视为一个相对流畅和自动的过程,因此阅读理解监控通常被视为所谓的“阅读的医学模式”——读者在遇到困难或陷入困境时所做的事情。

We should not be overly critical of students, since these aspects of text, while central to the skilled reading of history, are rarely addressed in school curricula or in the educational or psychological literature on reading comprehension.16 For example, one article on skilled reading lays out a “Taxonomy of Comprehension Failures” cataloging the things that can go wrong during reading. The authors cite such problems as the failure to understand a word, the failure to understand a sentence, the failure to understand the relationship between sentences, and the failure to understand how the whole text fits together. But no mention is made of the failure to understand the author's intention, the failure to grasp the polemic of the text, the failure to recognize the connotations (not just the denotations) of words, the failure to situate the text in a disciplinary matrix, or the failure to do any of a host of other things that loom large when reading historical texts. Similarly, these aspects of reading are overlooked when researchers train their lens on “comprehension monitoring.” Because skilled comprehension is viewed as a relatively fluid and automatic process, comprehension monitoring is often seen in light of what might be called the “medical model of reading”—something readers do when they are in trouble or bogged down.

例如,安妮玛丽·帕林萨尔和安·布朗认为,熟练的阅读是一个相对自动化的过程,直到“某个触发事件提醒读者理解出现问题”。此时,熟练的读者必须“放慢速度,并投入更多精力处理问题区域。他们必须运用调试工具或主动策略,这需要时间和精力。” ¹⁷但对于具有更宏大修辞和社会目的的文本,读者也可能出于我们尚未理解的原因而“放慢速度并投入更多精力”。例如,当历史文本变得内容丰富且概念密集时,读者放慢速度可能并非因为他们无法理解,而是因为理解本身就要求他们停下来与文本对话。这正是罗兰·巴特区分“可读”( lisible)文本和“可写”(scriptible )文本的关键所在18.读者可读的文本是约定俗成的文档,它们传达的是简单明了、不具争议性的信息,例如如何更换汽车机油或火山如何喷发熔岩。这类文本符合人们对意义的通常预期。它们通常是被动和自动处理的。然而,用大卫·哈兰的话来说,书面文本,

Annemarie Palincsar and Ann Brown, for example, see skilled reading as a relatively automatic process until “a triggering event alerts [readers] to a comprehension failure. “At that point, expert readers must ”slow down and allot extra processing to the problem area. They must employ debugging devices or active strategies that take time and effort.”17 But with texts that have larger rhetorical and social purposes, readers may also “slow down and allot extra processing” for reasons we have yet to understand. For instance, as historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to talk with their texts. This is the point behind Roland Barthe's distinction between “readerly” (lisible) and “writerly” (scriptible) texts.18 Readerly texts are conventional documents that convey nonproblematic, straightforward messages, like how one changes the oil of a car or how a volcano spews forth lava. Such texts conform to ordinary expectations of meaning and are often processed passively and automatically. However, writerly texts, in the words of David Harlan,

挑战那些将意义孤立并归纳于读者文本中的惯例。为了在“作者式”文本中找到意义,读者必须亲自进入文本,必须积极参与意义的构建,才能最终领悟文本的意义。19

challenge the conventions that isolate and identify meaning in the readerly text. In order to find meaning in the “writerly” text, the reader has to enter the text personally, has to participate actively in the fabrication of whatever meaning is to be carried away.19

历史阅读高手如何进入文本,积极参与意义的建构?他们如何在阅读的同时“书写”文本?其中一种方法是在内心模拟人际互动过程。简单来说,他们通过自言自语来假装与他人进行讨论。20敏锐的阅读过程观察者早已注意到这一现象。例如,沃克·吉布森在一篇极具前瞻性的文章中预见了读者反应理论的后续发展趋势,他指出我们阅读文本时会模拟两种读者:一种是“真实读者”,另一种是“模拟读者”。21真实读者负责监督阅读过程中构建的意义。而模拟读者则会让自己被修辞手法所吸引,感受其效果,并体验精心雕琢的文字所引发的联想。当文本直白且极具说服力时,真实读者和模拟读者之间的距离很小——实际上,可能根本没有距离。但对于其他文本,真正的读者和假想的读者之间可能会形成鸿沟,当这种距离变得太大时,真正的读者就会介入并最终说道:“够了!这段文字不可信。”

How do skilled readers of history enter into the text to “participate actively in the fabrication of meaning”? How do they “write” texts while reading them? One way they do so is by simulating an interpsychic process intrapsychically. In plain English, they pretend to deliberate with others by talking to themselves.20 Keen observers of the reading process have long noted this phenomenon. For example, in a prescient essay that anticipated later trends in reader-response theory, Walker Gibson claimed that we read texts by simulating two readers, an “actual reader” and a “mock reader.”21 The actual reader is an overall monitor of the meanings constructed during reading. But the mock reader is the reader who allows himself or herself to be taken in by rhetorical devices, to feel their effect, and to experience the associations triggered by crafted prose. When texts are straightforward and highly probative, the distance between the actual and the mock reader is minimal—indeed, there may be no distance at all. But with other texts, a chasm can form between the actual and the mock reader, and when this distance becomes too great, the actual reader intercedes and says with finality, “Enough! This text is not to be believed.”

在历史学家的记录中,我们既能听到真实读者的声音,也能听到模拟读者的声音,但除此之外,还有其他的声音。历史阅读的复杂性在于,历史学家很少是他们所审阅文献的预期读者。作为旁听者,历史学家必须努力理解作者的意图和读者的反应,同时还要评估自身对这种交流的反应。事实上,有时模拟读者会变成模拟作者,参与到对一位早已逝去的作者的文献的改写中。表3.1中的例子说明了这一过程的动态互动。

The voices of actual and mock readers were audible in the protocols of historians, but other voices could be heard as well. The reading of history is complicated by the fact that historians are rarely the intended audience for the documents they review. As eavesdroppers on conversations between others, historians must try to understand both the author's intentions and the audience's reactions, all the while gauging their own reactions to this exchange. Indeed, sometimes the mock reader becomes a mock writer, joining in to rewrite a document with an author long departed. The example in Table 3.1 illustrates the dynamic interplay of this process.

爱丽丝是一位研究十七世纪英国的专家,曾在威斯康星大学接受培训。她阅读了约瑟夫·沃伦写给本杰明·富兰克林的信。表3.1展示了她研究方案的节选。

Alice, a specialist in seventeenth-century England who trained at the University of Wisconsin, read Joseph Warren's cover letter to Benjamin Franklin. Table 3.1 shows an excerpt from her protocol.

表3.1

前三行,由一系列代词构成,传达了阅读历史的复杂性:这些人究竟是谁?开篇,历史学家以实际读者的身份出现(第1行),承认她已经对文本的某个特定方面进行了评论。但到了第2行,她迅速切换到模拟作者的角色,与沃伦共同构建文本(如第2行的“我们”和第3行的“我们”所示),以“你们”——大不列颠的居民,以及后来的乔治国王本人——来与他们共同的读者对话,而不是以“他们”的身份。第4-7行进一步突出了实际读者和模拟读者之间的交流。在第4行,模拟读者首先揭示了“敌对行动已经开始”这句话的潜台词。实际读者观察着模拟读者的思路,澄清道:“这是一种叙述方式”,但随后又切换回模拟读者的语气——“我们是忠诚的同胞”(第5-6行)。在下一节(第8-30行),我们发现实际读者明确表示,她正在构建一个在文本表述中找不到的信息。这里,“你”再次指代模拟读者,历史学家(以约瑟夫·沃伦的口吻)为他们提供贯穿全文的潜台词。在第31-39行,历史学家总结了她所读到的内容(“他们没有被描述为……”),但添加了一些解释性标记,例如“所谓的”(第31行)。在本节的最后一段评论(第39行),爱丽丝从对文本的评论转向对潜台词的总结,再次以模拟读者的口吻说道:“我们像羔羊一样天真无邪。”

The first three lines, a congeries of pronouns, convey the complexity of reading history: Who are all these people? The protocol begins with the historian as actual reader (line 1), acknowledging that she has already commented on a particular aspect of the text. But in line 2 she quickly assumes the role of mock writer, co-constructing the text with Warren (as indicated by the use of “we” in line 2 and “us” in line 3) to address their joint audience—not as “them” but as “you” the inhabitants of Great Britain and, later, King George himself. Lines 4–7 further highlight the flow of communication between actual and mock reader. In line 4, the mock reader begins by laying bare the subtext of the sentence “hostilities are already commenced.” Monitoring the mock reader, the actual reader offers a clarifying “It's a way of telling” but then flips back to the voice of the mock reader—“we are loyal fellow subjects” (lines 5–6). In the next section (lines 8–30), we find an explicit statement by the actual reader that she is constructing a message not found in the manifest text. Here again “you” refers to the mock audience, for whom the historian (taking on the voice of Joseph Warren) provides a running subtextual commentary. In lines 31–39, the historian summarizes what she has read (“they're not described as…”), but adds a few interpretive markers such as “so-called” (line 31). In the final comment of this section (line 39), Alice turns from a review of the text to a summary of the subtext, again taking the voice of the mock reader: “we are as innocent as lambs.”

在这段节选中,阅读模拟了社会交流中的互动。首先,我们听到沃伦的声音,他用略显生硬的文风阐述着隐藏在字里行间的真实信息。接下来是“你们”,指的是英国公民,甚至是乔治国王本人。然后是“我们”,指的是扮演历史学家角色的虚构作家,他与沃伦共同构建了文本。最后,是真正的读者——“我”,她如同舞台导演一般,指挥着这群虚构人物,指导他们的台词,审视他们的言行,并最终注意到自身理解与虚构读者所言之间的鸿沟。正是这个“我”,最终因自身想法与她所创造的人物之间的巨大差异而捧腹大笑。

In this excerpt, reading simulates the give and take of social exchange. First we hear Warren's voice, enunciating the real message behind his stilted prose. Next there is “you” the citizens of Great Britain or King George himself. Then there is “we” a reference to the historian as mock writer co- constructing the text with Warren. Finally, there is the “I” of the actual reader, who acts as stage director for this cast of mental characters, dictating their lines, monitoring what they say, and ultimately noting the breach between her own understanding and the claims made by the mock reader. And it is this “I” who ultimately breaks down in laughter at the disparity between her own thoughts and those of the characters she has created.

文字难以捕捉到这种朗读方式所蕴含的滑稽元素。这是一种游戏式的朗读,它充满玩笑和嘲讽,时而采用戏谑的英雄腔调,时而采用戏谑的悲剧腔调,最终,当真正的朗读者和扮演朗读者的角色变得如此疏离,以至于彼此几乎无法辨认时,朗读便沦为一场笑声。事实上,历史学家在第42行的笑声就暗示了这种隔阂。扮演朗读者的角色变成了被嘲笑的对象,她以一种矫揉造作的模仿方式念着台词。

Written words fail to capture the elements of burlesque that characterize this reading. This is a ludic reading that jokes and jibes, that adopts mock-heroic and mock-tragic voices, and that ultimately degenerates into laughter when the actual and mock reader become so estranged that they barely recognize each other. Indeed, the historian's laughter in line 42 hints at this breach. The mock reader turns into an object of ridicule enunciating her lines in melodramatic parody.

在这里,阅读超越了作者与读者之间的对话,而变成了一系列对话——真实读者和模拟读者之间的交流。在模拟作者和模拟读者之间,在模拟读者和模拟读者之间,以及在这些角色中的任何一个与实际读者的“我”之间,都存在着互动。成熟的历史读者不会像传统读者那样,由单一的“执行者”自上而下地指挥流程,而是会在自己的脑海中构建一个“执行委员会”,成员们会就争议点大声疾呼、争论不休。22文本与其说是被“处理”,不如说是被“复活”。而将读者比作信息处理器或计算设备——这种比喻在当前的阅读讨论中常常占据主导地位——似乎不如另一种比喻更贴切:读者如同死灵法师。

Here reading moves beyond an author-reader dialogue to embrace a set of conversations—exchanges between actual and mock reader, between mock writer and mock audience, between mock reader and mock audience, and between any one of these characters and the “I” of the actual reader. Instead of a single “executive” directing a top-down process, mature readers of history may create inside their own heads an “executive board” where members clamor, shout, and wrangle over controversial points.22 Texts are not “processed” as much as they are resurrected, and the image of reader as information processor or computing device, which often dominates current discussions of reading, seems less apt than another metaphor: the reader as necromancer.

为了说明读者如何根据文本残存部分重构作者,23让我描述一下我使用的另一个资料来源,即1775年耶鲁学院院长埃兹拉·斯泰尔斯的一篇日记。斯泰尔斯不仅记录了他作为学院管理者的生活,还详细描述了他所处时代的事件。他关于列克星顿的日记开头写道:“皮特凯恩少校(英国指挥官)为人正直,却身处险境,他至死都坚持认为殖民者先开火……他明确表示自己没有看到是谁先开的火;但他仍然相信是农民先开的。” 24这时,日本历史专家玛丽评论道:

To illustrate how readers reconstructed authors from their textual remainders,23 let me describe another one of the sources I used, a diary entry by Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College in 1775. Stiles not only wrote about his life as a college administrator but described in great detail the unfolding events of his day. His entry about Lexington began: “Major Pitcairn [the British commander] who was a good man in a bad cause, insisted upon it to the day of his death, that the colonists fired first…. He expressly says he did not see who fired first; and yet believed the peasants began.”24 At this point, Mary, a specialist in Japanese history, commented:

尽管埃兹拉·斯泰尔斯标榜自己是民主人士,但某种程度上,他给人的感觉却非常阶级化。我的意思是,你可以看出皮特凯恩和斯泰尔斯出身同一阶层。或许并非如此,但他们都因各自的成长经历而为人正直,所以他​​算是“身处险境的好人”。我从斯泰尔斯使用的一些词语中也能感受到这一点——我不知道斯泰尔斯的背景,但我推测他并非贵族出身,但他受过良好的教育,如果他在十八世纪末担任耶鲁大学校长,那他很可能是一位神职人员;在那个时期,耶鲁大学的大多数校长可能都是神职人员。所以,即使他并非贵族,也受过良好的教育。但皮特凯恩很可能出身贵族,因为我相信,直到二战之前,大多数英国指挥官或军官都出身于某种贵族阶层。25

Ezra Stiles for all his supposed democracy comes across as very kind of classist in a way. I mean, you can tell that Pitcairn is from the same class as Stiles. Maybe not, but they both are men of integrity because of their upbringing, so he's “a good man in a bad cause.” And I get that sense from some of the terms that Stiles uses—I don't know what Stiles' background is but I assume he's not aristocratic but he’s educated, probably a man of the cloth if he was president of Yale in the late eighteenth century; at that point probably most of them were clergy. So he was educated even if not a noble. But Pitcairn probably was, because until World War II, I believe, most British commanders were, or its officers were, from nobility of some sort.25

在玛丽的解读中,埃兹拉·斯泰尔斯是一个“阶级主义者”(基于他傲慢的语气和使用“农民”一词),一个神职人员(基于文本线索和她的背景知识),受过良好教育但可能并非贵族成员,也是一个伪君子(基于斯泰尔斯的爱国情怀与他称同胞为“农民”之间的矛盾)。玛丽在其他地方谈到了斯泰尔斯的写作动机,但在这里,她的评论并非针对作者的意图,而是针对斯泰尔斯本人。同样,当汤姆——一位研究葡萄牙在新大陆殖民的专家——阅读斯泰尔斯的条目时,他压低了声音,嘴里叼着铅笔,仿佛那是一根烟斗。

In Mary's reading, Ezra Stiles is a “classist” (based on his haughty tone and his use of “peasants”), a cleric (based on textual cues and her background knowledge), well-educated but probably not a member of the aristocracy, and a hypocrite (based on the discrepancy between Stiles' patriotism and his reference to his compatriots as “peasants”). Elsewhere Mary talks about Stiles' motives for writing, but here her comments are not about the author’ intentions but about the man himself. Similarly, when Tom, an expert on Portuguese colonization in the New World, read Stiles' entry, he deepened his voice and dangled his pencil from his mouth as if it were a pipe:

我心想(声音低沉):一个和蔼的耶鲁人想说点什么,你知道,(声音再次低沉)“皮特凯恩少校是个非常好的人。”我当时就觉得,这是理性的声音,常春藤盟校高深的圣公会正统观念…… “农民”——这词真妙……我的意思是,我们现在读的是美国革命。毕竟,它应该是一群自耕农奋力捍卫自身权利的故事,而这里是耶鲁大学的校长……他的祖先来自英国,赚够了钱送他去耶鲁,让他当上了耶鲁的校长……这是精英阶层在谈论农民。26

I'm thinking [voice deepens]: a nice Yale man trying to say something, you know, [voice deepens again] “Major Pitcairn was a veeeeery good man.” I'm just thinking that this is the voice of reason, Ivy League high Episcopalian orthodoxy…. “Peasants”—it's just a great word…I mean here we are reading about the American Revolution. After all, it's supposed to be a bunch of yeoman farmers vigorously defending their rights and here is the president of Yale…whose ancestors came from England and who made enough money to send him to Yale and get him to be president of Yale…. This is the elite talking about the peasant.26

在这两种解读中,文本并非毫无生气的罗列事实,而是开启人性之门的钥匙,揭示人有其喜好、偏见、弱点、姿态和信念。文字具有质感和形态,正是这种近乎触觉般的特质,让读者得以塑造出使用它们的作者的形象。这些形象随后会根据阅读语境和读者的倾向,被质疑、嘲讽、赞扬或否定。在这样的解读中,作者和文本一样,都被解码。

In both of these readings, texts are not lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, biases and foibles, airs and convictions. Words have texture and shape, and it is their almost tactile quality that lets readers sculpt images of the writers who use them. These images are then interrogated, mocked, congratulated, or dismissed, depending on the context of the reading and the disposition of the reader. In such readings, authors, as well as texts, are decoded.

但反过来也成立:正如读者解读作者一样,文本也解读读者。因为文本呈现的是各种可能性,而非一成不变的意义集合,所以我收集到的这些出声思考记录或许更多地反映了文本的读者,而非文本的作者。 27在上述记录中,激怒历史学家的词语是“农民”,这个词让人联想到农民与精英之间的阶级斗争。无论埃兹拉·斯泰尔斯在1775年写作的本意是什么,在这两位20世纪后半叶分别就读于哈佛和斯坦福的历史学家看来,斯泰尔斯笔下的农民变成了马克思和恩格斯笔下的农民,他们与城市无产阶级联合起来推翻了资产阶级。然而,当我们查阅《牛津英语词典》中“peasant”(农民)一词的历史用法时,会发现它其实可以简单地指“在土地上劳作的人,无论是小农还是工人……主要依靠自己和家人劳动所得维持生计的人”。那么,埃兹拉·斯泰尔斯究竟是什么意思呢?

But the converse is also true: Just as readers decode authors, so texts decode readers. Because texts present plays of potentialities, not sets of meanings forever fixed, the think-aloud protocols I obtained may tell us more about those who read these texts than about those who wrote them.27 In the above protocol, the word that riles the historians is “peasants” a word that calls up images of class struggle between peasants and elites. Whatever Ezra Stiles writing in 1775 may have meant, in the minds of these two historians, educated at Harvard and Stanford in the latter half of the twentieth century, Stiles' peasants become the peasants of Marx and Engels, who join with the urban proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Yet, when we look at the historical uses of “peasant” in the Oxford English Dictionary, we find that the word can simply mean “one who works on the land, either as small farmer or as laborer…one who relies for his subsistence mainly on the produce of his own labor and that of his household.” So what did Ezra Stiles mean?

毫无疑问,将十九世纪后半叶成书的《资本论》中“农民”一词的含义与埃兹拉·斯泰尔斯1775年的条目联系起来是有问题的。事实上,有人可能会认为这两位历史学家都理解错了:斯泰尔斯并非在区分富人和穷人、特权阶层和受压迫者、农民和精英,而只是在指出城市和乡村之间的差异,指出那些像他一样通过管理学院谋生的人和那些靠辛勤劳动谋生的人之间的差异。

It is no doubt problematic to attach the connotations of “peasant” found in Das Kapital, written in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to Ezra Stiles' entry of 1775. In fact, one could argue that these two historians have got it wrong: Stiles was not making a distinction between rich and poor, privileged and downtrodden, peasant and elite, but simply noting a difference between urban and rural, between those who, like himself, earned their bread by administering a college and those who earned it by the sweat of their brow.

如果问题真有那么简单就好了!牛津英语词典》列举了斯泰尔斯生前及生前“peasant”(农民)一词的其他用法。早在1550年,这个词就带有了贬义,暗示着无知、愚蠢和粗鲁,常与“buzzardly”(秃鹫般的)等形容词连用,并与“coward”(懦夫)和“rascal”(恶棍)等词语并列。因此,问题依然存在:斯泰尔斯是否仅仅把这些人看作农民?或者,他是否认为他们是愚昧无知之徒,与正直的皮特凯恩少校——毕竟,他是一位“身处险境的好人”——几乎没有任何共同之处?

If only the problem were that simple! The Oxford English Dictionary enumerates other ways in which “peasant” was used before and during Stiles' lifetime. As early as 1550, the word had taken on pejorative connotations, implying ignorance, stupidity, and boorishness, modified by adjectives like “buzzardly” and placed in apposition to “coward” and “rascal.” So the question remains: Did Stiles think of these men as farmers, nothing more? Or did he think of them as ignoramuses, men who shared little in common with the honorable Major Pitcairn, who was, after all, a “good man in a bad cause”?

为了解决这一困境,一些历史学家建议我们摒弃当下的观念,沉浸于过去的语言之中,感受过去人物的感受,理解他们(而非我们)赋予词语的内涵。唯有放弃我们自身的局限,我们才能真正从历史的角度去认识它。历史学家有时为此不遗余力;罗伯特·E·李的传记作者道格拉斯·弗里曼就试图通过限制自己只了解李的认知范围,并在这些认知和认知的界限内撰写传记,从而重构李的思想。 28

To solve this dilemma, some historians would recommend that we shed our presentist conceptions, immerse ourselves in the language of the past, feel what past actors felt, and understand the connotations that they, not we, attach to words. Only by renouncing our own condition can we come to know the past on its own terms. Historians have sometimes gone to great lengths to do this; Robert E. Lee's biographer Douglas Freeman tried to reconstruct what Lee thought by limiting himself to what Lee knew, and then writing a biography within these boundaries of knowledge and ignorance.28

毫无疑问,当我们了解到“农民”一词有多种含义时,我们的理解会更加丰富,但这并不能解答斯泰尔斯究竟意欲何为的问题;它只是拓宽了这个问题。正因如此,读者心中构建的作者形象始终只是形象而已——正如卡尔·贝克尔所言,这个形象总是受到“我们当下的目的、欲望、先入之见和偏见的影响,所有这些都参与到认知过程中……实际事件会为想象的画面贡献一些东西;但持有这种想象画面的头脑也总是会做出一些贡献。” 29

No doubt our understanding is enriched when we learn that “peasant” has multiple meanings, but this knowledge does not put to rest the question of what Stiles meant; it simply widens it. This is why the image of the author constructed in reader's minds remains just that—an image—which, in Carl Becker's words, is always shaped by “our present purposes, desires, prepossessions, and prejudices, all of which enter into the process of knowing…. The actual event contributes something to the imagined picture; but the mind that holds the imagined picture always contributes something too.”29

文本认识论

AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF TEXT

当我们比较历史学家和学生如何解读这些文献时,几乎在任何评判标准上都会发现显著差异。单就这一点而言,这并不令人惊讶;毕竟,历史学家掌握的历史知识远比学生丰富。但仔细分析后,这种解释却意义不大。当我们说历史学家“做得更好”是因为他们是历史学家时,我们只是用归因代替了解释。那么,“掌握更多历史知识”究竟意味着什么?当一位研究二十世纪劳工史的历史学家或一位专攻十三世纪伊斯兰文献的中世纪史学家坐下来阅读美国革命史时,他们的理解又会如何呢?

When we compare how historians and students read these documents, we see dramatic differences on practically any criterion we select. By itself, this news should shock no one; after all, historians know much more history. But on closer examination, this explanation tells us precious little. We simply substitute ascription for explanation when we say that historians “did better” because they are historians. What does it mean to “know more history”? What goes on when a historian of labor in the twentieth century or a medievalist who specializes in thirteenth- century Islamic texts sits down to read about the American Revolution?

人们或许会认为,这两组学生在历史知识方面存在巨大差异,尤其如果我们把这种“知识”定义为历史考试中经常出现的美国革命相关人名、日期和概念。事实上,两名高中生回答的辨识题(例如,“提康德罗加堡是什么?” “乔治·格伦维尔是谁?” “汤森法案是什么?”)比一位历史学家还要多,而另一位历史学家也只比大多数学生多答对一道题。但了解历史远比回答这类问题复杂得多。学生们很少能理解阅读材料中的弦外之音,他们对观点的理解仅限于判断一份文件属于哪一方,他们很少将不同的叙述进行比较,而是一味地寻找正确答案,并在遇到矛盾时感到慌乱——所有这些都表明,仅仅记住人名和日期是不够的。

One might suppose that dramatic differences in topical knowledge separated these two groups, particularly if we define such “knowledge” as the names, dates, and concepts of the American Revolution that often appear in history tests. In point of fact, two high school students answered more of the identification questions (e.g., “What was Fort Ticonderoga?” “Who was George Grenville?” “What were the Townshend Acts?”) than one of the historians, and another historian got only one more answer than most students. But knowing history is more complicated than answering such questions. That students so rarely saw subtexts in what they read, that their understanding of point of view was limited to which “side” a document was on, that they rarely compared one account with another, instead searching for the right answer and becoming flustered in the face of contradictions—all hint at a need for something more than knowing names and dates.

我认为,各组学生研究方法上的差异可以追溯到他们对历史探究的根本信念,或者说,可以称之为文本认识论。对学生而言,阅读历史并非探究作者意图或将文本置于社会语境中的过程,而是收集信息,文本仅仅是信息的载体。如此聪颖的学生怎会对那些令历史学家一眼就能发现的潜台词视而不见呢?答案或许在于二世纪教父特土良的一句格言。特土良的圣经诠释首要原则是“我信,为知”(credo ut intelligam )。学生必须首先相信潜台词的存在,才能看到它们。如果缺乏这种信念,学生们要么会忽略文本,要么根本不知道如何去寻找那些旨在塑造他们认知或引导他们以特定方式看待事件的特征。学生们或许“处理”了文本,但却未能真正与之产生共鸣。

The differences in each group's approach can be traced, I think, to sweeping beliefs about historical inquiry, or what might be called an epistemology of text. For students, reading history was not a process of puzzling about author's intentions or situating texts in a social world but of gathering information, with texts serving as bearers of information. How could such bright students be oblivious to the subtexts that jumped out at historians? The answer may lie in an aphorism of Tertullian, the second-century church father whose first principle of biblical exegesis was credo ut intelligam (“I believe in order to understand”). Before students can see subtexts, they must first believe they exist. In the absence of such beliefs, students simply overlooked or did not know how to seek out features designed to shape their perceptions or make them view events in a particular way. Students may have “processed texts” but they failed to engage with them.

这种信念或许有助于解释“来源启发式”(即在阅读正文之前先阅读文献来源)使用上的差异。历史学家几乎总是使用这种启发式方法(98%),而学生使用率不到三分之一(31%)。对大多数学生而言,文本的出处并不重要;它仅仅是一系列文本命题中的最后一条信息。对历史学家来说,文献的出处并非文献的终点,而是起点;他们视来源为人,而非物;视来源为社会交流,而非命题集合。从这个意义上讲,来源启发式仅仅体现了一种信念体系,在这种体系中,文本由其作者定义。

Such beliefs may help to explain differences in the use of the “sourcing heuristic” the practice of reading the source of the document before reading the actual text. Historians used this heuristic nearly all of the time (98 percent), while students used it less than a third (31 percent). For most students, the text's attribution carried no special weight; it was merely the final bit of information in a string of textual propositions. To historians, a document's attribution was not the end of the document but its beginning; sources were viewed as people, not objects, as social exchanges, not sets of propositions. In this sense, the sourcing heuristic was simply the manifestation of a belief system in which texts were defined by their authors.

当文本被视为人类的创造物时,其中所表达的内容就变成了这与作者是谁密不可分。但对一些学生来说,作者和他们的叙述之间只有松散的联系。所以,当一位学生最初读到霍华德·法斯特的节选时,他就知道有些不对劲:“你不能完全相信他们说的。细节肯定不对。”但当这位学生读到最后一份文献时,他对法斯特的疑虑就烟消云散了,因为这篇虚构叙述中的一些元素清晰地融入了他的理解之中。另一方面,一位美国史专家在看到殖民者列队“整齐列队”的说法时停顿了一下。他想起之前有一份文献描述过战斗阵型,于是翻回法斯特的节选,然后突然大笑起来:“哦,那是法斯特说的!算了!我不能相信法斯特;我做不到。但这很有趣;它一直萦绕在我的脑海里。”这里我们看到了相反的情况:一个细节被记住了,但历史学家却记不起它的出处。这位历史学家将细节与作者重新联系起来后,便将其否定了,因为他知道没有独立存在的细节——只有与证人相关的细节。

When texts are viewed as human creations, what is said becomes inseparable from who says it. But for some students, authors and their accounts were only loosely connected. So, when one student initially read the excerpt from Howard Fast, he knew something was wrong: “You can't really believe exactly what they're saying. It's going to be, the details are going to be off.” But by the time this student reached the last document, his reservations about Fast had fallen by the wayside, as elements from this fictitious account were clearly present in his understanding. An Americanist, on the other hand, paused when he encountered the claim that the colonists were drawn up in “regular order.” Remembering that an earlier document described the battle formation, he flipped back to the Fast excerpt and then burst into laughter: “Oh, that's from Fast! Forget it! I can't hold on to Fast; I can't do that. But it's funny; it stuck in my mind.” Here we see the opposite case: a detail is remembered, but the historian cannot remember its source. Reunited with its author, the detail is rejected, for this historian knows that there are no free-floating details—only details tied to witnesses.

法庭的比喻或许有助于我们理解这些差异。历史学家研读这些文献时,如同扮演检察官一般;他们不仅聆听证词,更积极地将文献并列比较,找出矛盾之处,质疑史料来源,并探究其有意或无意的动机,从而推动事件发展。而学生则如同陪审员,耐心聆听证词,并对所听到的内容进行自我反思,但却无法直接质问证人或对其进行交叉询问。对学生而言,权威在于文本本身;而对历史学家而言,权威则在于他们围绕文本提出的问题。30

The metaphor of the courtroom may help us understand these differences. Historians worked through these documents as if they were prosecuting attorneys; they did not merely listen to testimony but actively drew it out by putting documents side by side, locating discrepancies, and questioning sources and delving into their conscious and unconscious motives. Students, on the other hand, were like jurors, patiently listening to testimony and questioning themselves about what they heard, but unable to question witnesses directly or subject them to cross-examination. For students, the locus of authority was in the text; for historians, it was in the questions they formulated about the text.30

一群才华横溢的高中毕业生为何对历史文本的阅读能力如此匮乏?他们明明掌握了如此丰富的历史知识,为何却对如何阅读历史文本如此缺乏理解?这些问题并不简单,其答案也超出了本章的讨论范围。但至少,我们可以从学生在历史课上阅读的文本类型入手。教科书主导着历史课堂,正如彼得·施拉格所指出的,历史教科书的写作方式往往“仿佛作者根本不存在,仿佛他们只是某种神圣智慧的工具,记录着官方的真理”。 31艾文·克里斯莫尔证实了施拉格的观点。她对历史教科书、学术历史文本和通俗历史文本进行了话语分析,发现“元话语”(即判断、强调和不确定性的表达)在历史写作中被频繁使用,但在传统教科书中,这种现象极为罕见。克里斯莫尔发现,大多数教科书都避免使用“可能”、“或许”、“似乎”或“也许”之类的限定词,几乎没有表明解释与书页上的文字有任何关联。这种写作方式可能会导致学生无法超越字面理解:“当限定词缺失时,批判性阅读(学习评估和判断真假条件)会发生什么变化?当偏见不明显时(就像大多数教科书那样),年轻的读者是否会被蒙蔽?” 32

What accounts for the fact that a group of bright high school seniors displayed such a rudimentary sense of how to read a historical text? How could they know so much history yet have so little sense of how to read it? These are not simple questions, and their answers lie beyond the scope of this chapter. But, at the very least, we can point to the types of texts students have read in their history classes. Textbooks dominate history classrooms, and, as Peter Schrag has noted, history textbooks are often written “as if their authors did not exist at all, as if they were simply the instruments of a heavenly intelligence transcribing official truths.”31 Avon Crismore has documented Schrag's claim. In a discourse analysis of history textbooks and academic and popular historical texts, she found that “metadiscourse” or indications of judgment, emphasis, and uncertainty, was used frequently in historical writing but appeared rarely in conventional textbooks. Crismore found that most textbooks abjured hedges like “may” or “might” “appears” or “perhaps” providing little indication that interpretation had anything to do with the words on the page. Such writing may contribute to student's inability to move beyond the literal: “What happens to critical reading (learning to evaluate and make judgments about truth conditions) when hedges…are absent? When bias is not overt (as it is not in most textbooks) are young readers being deceived?”32

或许克里斯莫尔的论点有些夸大其词。或许她的发现和我的研究结果都无需过度担忧;或许学生们对文本的幼稚看法会在他们进入大学后自然而然地被抛弃。然而,证据却表明并非如此。例如,詹姆斯·洛伦斯在观察大学新生时,发现他们持有与此处描述类似的信念。他写道,许多学生“期望一份文件能够揭示他们认为的‘真理’……他们坚持不懈地寻求对眼前资料可靠性的最终结论。” 33同样,罗伯特·伯克霍弗也曾撰文指出,他在本科生中经常遇到“历史原教旨主义”,这些学生“将指定的阅读材料和教科书,甚至他们的老师,都视为神圣启示。” 34在卡内基梅隆大学,研究人员克里斯蒂娜·哈斯和琳达·弗劳尔让本科生在阅读一系列论战性文本时进行思考。她们发现,大学生能够轻松地解读文本的基本含义,并概括其要点。然而,

Perhaps Crismore overstates her case. Perhaps her findings and mine are little cause for alarm; perhaps student's naive beliefs about text will simply be sloughed off when they get to college. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. For example, James Lorence, in observations of college freshmen, found beliefs similar to those described here. Many students, he wrote, “expect a document to reveal something which they may regard as ‘the truth.’…They persist in seeking a definitive conclusion on the reliability of the source before them.”33 Similarly, Robert Berkhofer has written about the “historical fundamentalism” he encounters frequently among undergraduates, who “treat their assigned readings and textbooks, if not their teachers, as divinely inspired.”34 At Carnegie Mellon University, researchers Christina Haas and Linda Flower had undergraduates think aloud as they read a series of polemical texts. They found that college students could easily decipher the basic meaning of texts and formulate the gist of what they read. However,

这些学生常常让我们感到沮丧,因为他们只会复述而非分析,只会概括而非批判文本……我们可以假设,学生在批判性阅读晦涩文本时遇到的问题,与其说是他们构建的表征有问题,不如说是他们未能构建的表征有问题。他们对文本的表征与内容紧密相关:他们阅读是为了获取信息。我们的学生可能认为,只要他们理解了所有单词,并且能够复述文本的主旨内容,就意味着他们成功地阅读了文本。35

these same students often frustrate us, as they paraphrase rather than analyze, summarize rather than criticize texts…. We might hypothesize that the problem students have with critical reading of difficult texts is less the representations they are constructing than those they fail to construct. Their representations of text are closely tied to content: they read for information. Our students may believe that if they understand all the words and can paraphrase the propositional content of the text they have successfully read it.35

事实上,持有这些观点的可能并非只有学生;有时他们也会与老师分享这些观点。在对高中社会研究教师知识增长情况进行的一项研究中,我和苏珊娜·威尔逊采访了一位老师,她告诉我们,诠释在历史理解中几乎不起作用:“历史就是发生了什么的基本事实。发生什么事你不会问它是如何发生的。你只会问,‘发生了什么事?’” 36 总之,我们可以找到历史上某些时期——例如中世纪——青少年和成年人都接受了前批判性的历史编纂观念。 37这种观点认为……学生进入成年后自然而然会放弃某些信念,但这既没有数据也没有历史依据。

Indeed, students may not be the only ones who embrace these beliefs; sometimes they share them with their teachers. In a study of knowledge growth among high school social studies teachers, Suzanne Wilson and I interviewed one teacher who told us that interpretation had little role to play in historical understanding: “History is the basic facts of what happened. What did happen. You don't ask how it happened. You just ask, ‘What are the events?’”36 In sum, we can locate entire epochs of history—the Middle Ages, for one—when precritical notions of historiography were embraced by adolescent and adult alike.37 The notion that such beliefs are naturally abandoned as students enter adulthood has neither data nor history on its side.

从阅读方式到认知方式

FROM WAYS OF READING TO WAYS OF KNOWING

我们急于构建包罗万象的阅读模式,却常常忽略了文本中那些赋予其形态和意义的特质。当历史文本从学科领域进入学校课程时,我们强迫它们放弃自身的独特性。 38历史文本变成了“学校教材”,很快就与其他学科的教材——例如生物、语言艺术等——更加相似,而非与其原本所属学科的文本相似。 39 例如,历史话语的显著特征——通过脚注不断引用文献记录——恰恰是历史文本变成历史教科书时被忽略的方面。当我们压制了历史叙事是如何被构建的证据时,难怪许多学生会将历史视为一个封闭的故事。

In our zeal to arrive at overarching models of reading, we often ignore qualities of the text that give it shape and meaning. When historical texts make the journey from the discipline to the school curriculum, we force them to check their distinctiveness at the door.38 The historical text becomes the “school text” and soon bears a greater resemblance to other school texts—in biology, language arts, and other subjects—than to its rightful disciplinary referent.39 So, for example, the defining feature of historical discourse—its constant reference to the documentary record through footnotes—is the very aspect that drops out when historical texts become history textbooks. No wonder many students come to see history as a closed story when we suppress the evidence of how that story was assembled.

更广泛地说,最初催生“历史”、“物理”、“文学”和“数学”这些标签的认识论区分,在学校课程中逐渐被掩盖。尽管我们将学校课程划分成不同的时段,希望借此培养学生运用多种认知方式的能力,但我们最终往往只教授一种认知方式。尽管学生在不同的课程中学习不同的词汇——生物课上的“有丝分裂”、英语课上的“主题”、历史课上的“陈述行为”以及数学课上的“功能”——但这些词汇上的区分却有着共同的深层结构:知识脱离经验,是确定无疑的,没有任何限定和保留,其来源是教科书和教师,并且可以通过考试来衡量,而考试的每个问题都有一个正确答案。40

More broadly, the epistemological distinctions that first gave rise to the labels “history” “physics” “literature” and “mathematics” become eclipsed in the school curriculum. Although we carve the school day into separate periods, hoping thereby to teach students to be multilingual in various ways of knowing, we too often end up teaching a single tongue. Although students learn different vocabularies in different classes—“mitosis” in biology, “theme” in English, “Declaratory Acts” in history, and “function” in mathematics—these lexical distinctions share a common deep structure: Knowledge is detached from experience, it is certain and comes shorn of hedge and qualification, its source is textbooks and teachers, and it can be measured with tests in which every question has a right answer.40

学科同质化的进程甚至在教师培训教材中也显而易见。例如,一本流行的阅读教材告诉未来的教师,在阅读历史文献时,“学生需要学习阅读策略,以识别文献的用途并学习如何阅读它们。” 41然而,这本书并没有详细阐述这些策略或描述历史学家的工作,而是引导读者阅读“科学阅读”章节。但是,将阅读DNA结构与阅读美国革命结构等同起来的“学科阅读”方法,掩盖了赋予文本意义的潜在假设。即使是认知心理学文献中对领域特定知识的日益重视,可能无意中加剧了这种混淆,因为它将知识等同于信息。 42在这种观点下,知识本身变得泛化,并根据语义网络中呈现的事实和关系的数量,或产生式系统中形式化的“如果/那么”条件进行分类。但正如路易斯·O·明克提醒我们的那样,领域超越了事实和概念的汇编或产生式的执行。它们构成了“独特且不可简化的理解世界的方式”, 43是组织经验和探究我们自身本质的宏大途径。因此,西部山脉这一主题对地质学家、历史学家和安塞尔·亚当斯来说,意义各不相同。阅读不仅仅是学习新信息的一种方式,更成为参与新型思维方式的一种途径。

The process of disciplinary homogenization is evident even in textbooks used in teacher training. So, for example, one popular reading textbook tells prospective teachers that, when reading historical documents, “students need to be guided to reading strategies for recognizing the uses of documents and for learning how to read them.”41 But rather than delineating such strategies or describing what historians do, this book directs readers to the chapter on “Reading in Science.” However, approaches to “reading in the content areas” that equate reading about the structure of DNA with reading about the structure of the American Revolution obscure the underlying assumptions that give texts meaning. Even the increased emphasis on domain-specific knowledge in the cognitive psychological literature may have unwittingly contributed to this confusion by equating knowledge with information.42 In this view knowledge itself becomes generic, classified according to the number of facts and relationships represented in a semantic net or “if/then” conditions formalized in a production system. But domains, as Louis O. Mink reminded us, go beyond compilations of facts and concepts or executions of productions. They constitute “unique and irreducible modes of comprehending the world,”43 sweeping ways of organizing experience and conducting inquiry into who we are. Thus, the topic of Western mountain ranges means one thing to a geologist, another to a historian, and still another to Ansel Adams. Reading is not merely a way to learn new information but becomes a way to engage in new kinds of thinking.

本文呈现的阅读理解图景与教育文献中常见的图景截然不同。为什么呢?首先,每种图景的出发点都不同。我们对“优秀读者”的大多数印象都来自学龄儿童,他们是尚未被学科知识体系所塑造的懵懂读者。阅读理解的本质变成了在都市成就测验、尼尔森-丹尼测验、盖茨-麦金尼测验或众多其他标准化阅读测试中取得好成绩所需的一切。然而,这些测试虽然高度相似,却远不能反映我们在现实世界中遇到的那些复杂多变的文本。我们对“阅读理解”的定义变成了阅读理解测试所衡量的内容:能够读懂由缺席作者撰写的、独立成篇且脱离其学科语境的特制文章;能够正确回答那些预设存在明确正确答案的选择题;熟悉那些掩盖文本作者信仰不可避免地渗透到文字中的格式;擅长解读字面意义而非隐含意义;以及能够处理独立段落而非在多个文本中建立互文联系。简而言之,阅读理解由文本、读者以及我们用来研究它的方法所定义。44

The image of reading comprehension presented here differs dramatically from images that often emerge from the education literature. Why? First, each image has a different starting point. Most of our portraits of the “good reader” come from schoolchildren, naive readers not yet socialized into disciplinary ways of knowing. The essence of reading comprehension becomes whatever it takes to do well on the Metropolitan Achievement Test, the Nelsen-Denny, the Gates-MacGinite, or any of a host of standardized reading measures. But these tests, all of which bear a strong family resemblance, are poor approximations of the slippery and indeterminate texts we encounter in the real world. Our definition of “reading comprehension” becomes what the reading comprehension tests measure: the ability to do well on specially designed passages written by absentee authors, each passage self-contained and decontextualized from the discipline that gives it meaning; the ability to respond correctly to multiple-choice questions that presume an unambiguous right answer; familiarity with formats that disguise the fact that texts are written by people whose beliefs ineluctably creep into their prose; skill at decoding literal as opposed to latent meaning; and the ability to process independent passages rather than create intertextual connections across multiple texts. In short, reading comprehension is defined by the texts, by the readers, and by the measures we use to study it.44

当我们放弃阅读理解文章中受控的词汇,不再关注小学生,而是关注以阅读为生的人时,我们对阅读理解的理解就会呈现出不同的面貌。45并不是说这两种理解方式孰对孰错;显然,它们各自告诉我们不同的信息。但当两者之间存在不匹配时,我们确实会遇到问题。我们提出的问题以及我们选择的阅读方式都至关重要。如果我们问“理解历史文本意味着什么?”,并且仅仅依赖于通用阅读理解测试的结果,我们或许能学到很多关于阅读的知识,但却对如何阅读历史知之甚少。

When we abandon the controlled vocabulary of the comprehension passage and look not at schoolchildren but at people who read for a living, we end up with a different image of comprehension.45 It is not that one of these images is right and the other wrong; clearly, each tells us different things. But we do have a problem when there is a mismatch between the questions we ask and the image of reading we select. If we ask, “What does it mean to comprehend a historical text?” and rely exclusively on what generic reading comprehension tests tell us, we may learn a great deal about reading, but little about reading history.

如果情况属实,我们应该用什么标准来评判学生对历史文本的理解?尽管对中小学生历史和社会研究文章的理解能力进行了广泛的测试,但即使在如今这个痴迷于标准的时代,标准问题也鲜少被提及。罗伯特·林恩对此深感遗憾,他写道:“与探究标准究竟从何而来相比,人们投入了过多的精力来解决那些假定存在某种标准的问题。” 46那么,我们的标准应该从何而来?在我看来,只有一个站得住脚的答案:我们必须从学科本身出发。

If this is true, what standard should we use to judge the comprehension of historical texts? Despite widespread testing of schoolchildren's comprehension of history and social studies passages, the question of standards is seldom addressed, even in an age obsessed with standards. Robert Linn lamented this situation when he wrote that “there has been a disproportionate amount of effort devoted to the solution of problems that assume the existence of a standard in comparison to answering questions about where the standard comes from in the first place.”46 And where should our standard come from? To me, there is only one defensible answer. We must look to the discipline.

多年来,历史学界似乎无人回顾过去。但一些发展预示着一场剧变。布拉德利学校历史委员会的报告代表着历史学家、教育学教授和高中教师们为认真探讨学校课程而付出的巨大努力。 47美国历史学家组织(OAH)扭转了自17以来取消其主要期刊“教师专栏”的趋势,创办了《历史杂志》 ,该刊专门探讨大学前历史教育的问题和前景。此外,在向OAH发表的主席致辞中,马里兰大学的路易斯·哈兰 48 将重点放在了学校历史以及历史学家在改革中可能发挥的作用上——这与他早前一次宣告学科改革学校历史的努力走向终结的致辞截然不同。 49 OAH的主席致辞历来是对史学最新进展的概述。

For many years it often seemed that no one in the discipline was looking back. But several developments suggest a dramatic change. The report of the Bradley Commission on History in Schools represents a considerable effort by historians, professors of education, and high school teachers to sit down and ask tough questions about the school curriculum.47 The Organization of American Historians (OAH), reversing a trend set in 17 when it discontinued the “Teacher's Section” of its major journal, has launched the Magazine of History, a publication devoted exclusively to the problems and prospects of precollegiate history. And in a presidential address to the OAH, traditionally a survey of the latest advances in historiography, the University of Maryland's Louis Harlan48 devoted his remarks to school history and the role that historians might play in its reform—a major shift from an earlier address that sounded the death knell for disciplinary efforts to improve school history.49

这一系列活动引发了关于诸多议题的深刻思考——小学阶段空洞乏味的“拓展视野”课程、教科书的质量、关于学生学习能力的说法是否站得住脚,以及标准化考试对学生学习的影响。这些批评标志着任何改革努力都迈出了宝贵的第一步。然而,我们最需要解答的问题——“教师需要做出哪些改变才能创建真正能促进学习的历史课堂?教师又该如何学习这些不同的教学方法?”——却鲜少在这些报告中得到解答。布拉德利委员会在教学法问题上大多保持沉默,但指出,正如生活一样,“多样性是学习的调味品”,并鼓励教师从各种教学方法和技巧中进行选择。然而,这些报告却鲜有提及。教学并非仅仅是选择合适的教学方法组合,正如历史诠释并非仅仅是选择合适的文献组合一样:正如苏珊娜·威尔逊所指出的,多样性或许令人愉悦,但未必具有教育意义。 50卓越的教学并非在于选择教学方法,而在于知识的转化。 51历史教师必须运用自身已有的知识,创造出能够激发学生新理解的内容呈现方式,而这些学生往往缺乏学习动力。做到这一点是一项极高的智力成就——其重要性不亚于对所要教授的内容有深刻的理解。

This flurry of activity has raised penetrating questions about many topics—the intellectually vacuous “expanding horizons” curriculum in the elementary school, the quality of textbooks, the warrant for claims about what students can learn, and the impact of standardized tests on student learning. These criticisms signal a valuable start in any reform effort. But the questions we most need to answer—“What would teachers have to do differently to create history classrooms where real learning takes place? How would teachers learn to teach in these different ways?”—are rarely addressed by these reports. The Bradley Commission, mostly mute on issues of pedagogy, noted that, as with life, “variety is the spice of learning” and encouraged teachers to select from a wide range of teaching methods and techniques. But exemplary teaching is not just a function of selecting the right mixture of methods, any more than historical interpretation is just a function of selecting the right mixture of documents: Variety, as Suzanne Wilson notes, may be entertaining but it is not necessarily educative.50 Expert teaching entails not a selection of methods, but the transformation of knowledge.51 History teachers must take what they know and create representations of content that engender new understandings among children who often come to school with scant motivation to learn. To do this is an intellectual achievement of the highest order—no less an achievement than arriving at a sophisticated understanding of the content one wants to teach.

历史学家在教学法方面鲜有沉默,汤姆·霍尔特(Tom Holt)的《历史思考》(Thinking Historically)一书是个例外,该书由美国大学理事会出版。 52 霍尔特在书中深思熟虑地反思了他在芝加哥大学教授本科历史的经历,其中蕴含着许多宝贵的见解。他描述了一门本科历史课程,该课程以“反学习”为开端,旨在消除学生认为历史是一个固定不变的故事的印象。学生们不再像伍德罗·威尔逊(Woodrow Wilson)所说的那样,在考试中罗列“一个又一个该死的事实”,而是拿到原始文献,并扮演博物馆馆长的角色,为展览对这些文献进行注释。霍尔特有意将观点对立的史料并置,让学生构建叙事,从而与过去展开持续的对话,而不是“一套封闭的教条或一系列已经得到解答的问题”。 53

One exception to historian's reticence on pedagogy is Tom Holt's Thinking Historically, published by the College Board.52 A thoughtful meditation on his teaching of undergraduates at the University of Chicago, Holt's work contains much of value. He describes an undergraduate history course that begins with “unlearning” an attempt to disabuse students of the impression that history is a fixed story. Instead of examinations in which students list, as Woodrow Wilson once put it, “one damn fact after another” they receive primary documents and pretend to be museum curators who must annotate these documents for an exhibit. Holt purposely juxtaposes sources with opposing viewpoints and has students construct narratives that constitute ongoing conversations with the past, not “a closed catechism or a set of questions already answered.”53

这些想法都很有意思。但它们共同指向了我们集体的无知,指向了我们对如何改变学生历史观念知之甚少这一事实。54 然而,如果我们等到高中才教学生用不同的问题去理解一篇短篇小说,用另一套问题去理解历史书,那么我们的努力注定会失败;他们必须在第一次接触到关于过去的说法时就学会提出这些问题。事实上,当我们检验我们对儿童能力的假设时,我们发现,在合适的条件下,即使是三年级的学生也能理解历史的不确定性,从而对过去做出深刻的解读。55

These are all intriguing ideas. But together they point to our collective ignorance, to the fact that we know little about changing student's beliefs about history.54 Our efforts to do so, however, will surely founder if we wait until high school to teach students to ask a short story one set of questions and their history book a different set; they must learn to ask such questions when they first encounter claims about the past. In fact, when we put our assumptions about children's capabilities to the test, we find that, under the right conditions, even third graders can grasp something of history's indeterminate nature and thereby arrive at sophisticated interpretations of the past.55

结论

CONCLUSION

20世纪30年代初,著名历史学家卡尔·贝克尔撰写了一篇题为《人人皆可作历史学家》的论文,他在文中声称,就像……一样。不管怎样,我们都是历史学家。56的意思是,我们都被召唤去进行历史思考——被召唤去洞察我们所读文本中的人性动机;被召唤去从每天试图吞噬我们的暗示、半真半假和谎言的流沙中挖掘真相;被召唤去勇敢地面对这样一个事实:至少在理解社会世界方面,确定性仍然难以捉摸,超出了我们的掌控。如果贝克尔的观点是正确的,那么学校历史课程就具有培养学生进行复杂思考和推理的巨大潜力。然而,我们是否能够充分利用这种潜力,则是另一回事了。

In the early thirties, the eminent historian Carl Becker wrote a paper entitled “Everyman His Own Historian” in which he claimed that, like it or not, we are all historians.56 What he meant was that we are all called on to engage in historical thinking—called on to see human motive in the texts we read; called on to mine truth from the quicksand of innuendo, half-truth, and falsehood that seeks to engulf us each day; called on to brave the fact that certainty, at least in understanding the social world, remains elusive and beyond our grasp. If Becker was right, then school history possesses great potential for teaching students to think and reason in sophisticated ways. Whether we exploit this potential, however, is another story.

这里所描述的文本观并非仅限于历史领域。语言并非用来作用于无生命物体的园艺工具,而是影响人心、改变观点、激发或平息激情的媒介。理解这一点对于阅读报纸、收听广播、评估竞选承诺,甚至根据塞尔公司的研究结果决定是否饮用纽特斯威特产品都至关重要。如果学生始终无法区分“反政府武装”和“自由战士”、“星球大战”和“战略防御倡议”、“恐怖分子”和“巴解组织成员”,如果他们将这些术语视为中性名称而非蕴含不同意义体系的符号,那么他们就很容易成为各种江湖骗子的猎物。我们只需回顾布什-杜卡基斯总统竞选时期,就能明白“威利·霍顿”——一位因强奸白人女性而被定罪的黑人——是如何成为家喻户晓的人物的。这则广告的潜台词花了近五个月的时间才成为公众辩论的话题——这比 NAEP 迄今为止设计的任何项目都更能有力地表明国民的批判性思维能力。

The view of text described here is not limited to history.57 Language is not a garden tool for acting on inanimate objects but a medium for swaying minds and changing opinions, for rousing passions or allaying them. This is a crucial understanding for reading the newspaper, for listening to the radio, for evaluating campaign promises, or for making a decision to drink a Nutrasweet product based on research conducted by the Searle Company. If students never learn to see the difference between the “contras” and the “freedom fighters” between “Star Wars” and the “Strategic Defense Initiative” between “terrorists” and “members of the PLO” if they think of these terms as neutral appellations rather than charged symbols tapping different meaning systems, they become easy marks for snake-oil vendors of all persuasions. We need to search our memories no farther back than the Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign, when “Willie Horton” a black man convicted of raping a white woman, became a household name. It took nearly five months for the subtext of this advertisement to become an issue of public debate—a more powerful indicator of national critical thinking skills than any NAEP item yet devised.

一本关于教授思维的新书广告声称,我们可以毫不费力地做到这一点——事实上,它声称我们可以“在不改变教案的情况下,将思维技能融入到所有课程中”。 58我对此并不确定。如果我们希望学生以不同于阅读驾驶手册的方式来阅读历史文本,如果我们希望他们能够理解文本及其潜台词,我认为我们必须改变教案——更不用说教科书了。至少,我们必须重新审视我们对从文本中获取知识的理解。传统的观点认为知识从文本页面直接传递到读者的头脑中,这种观点是不充分的。但元认知观点认为知识是通过学生对固定且易于理解的文本进行自我提问而构建的,这种观点同样不充分。我们最好还是听从这些话语。罗伯特·斯科尔斯说:“如果智慧,或者像更高的意识这样不那么宏大的概念,是我们努力的最终目标,那么我们就必须认识到,智慧不是从文本传递给学生的​​,而是学生通过质疑文本而发展出来的。” 59

An advertisement for a new book on teaching thinking claims that we can do so with little effort—indeed, it claims that we can “teach thinking skills across the curriculum without changing lesson plans.”58 I'm not so sure. If we want students to read historical texts differently from their driver's education manuals, if we want them to comprehend both text and subtext, I think we will have to change our lesson plans—not to mention our textbooks. If nothing else, we will have to reexamine our notions of what it means to acquire knowledge from text. The traditional view, in which knowledge goes from the page of the text to the head of the reader, is inadequate. But the metacognitive view, in which knowledge is constructed by students questioning themselves about a fixed and friendly text, is equally inadequate. We could do no better than to heed the words of Robert Scholes: “If wisdom, or some less grandiose notion such as heightened awareness, is to be the end of our endeavors, we shall have to see it not as something transmitted from the text to the student but as something developed in the student by questioning the text.”59

笔记

NOTES

本文最初发表于《美国教育研究杂志》第28卷(1991年)。它基于作者于1990年在斯坦福大学完成的博士论文,该论文由李·舒尔曼、大卫·泰克和已故的迪克·斯诺指导。拉里·库班、凯瑟琳·克雷恩-索雷森、帕姆·格罗斯曼、鲍勃·汉佩尔、黛比·克德曼、大卫·马德森、苏珊·莫纳斯、希拉·瓦伦西亚和苏珊娜·威尔逊对本章的早期版本提出了宝贵意见。该文的早期版本曾于1990年10月在哈佛大学举行的麦克阿瑟“思维语言”会议上发表。感谢大卫·奥尔森的邀请和持续鼓励。

This essay originally appeared in the American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991). It is based on a dissertation completed at Stanford in 1990 and supervised by Lee Shulman, David Tyack, and the late Dick Snow. Previous versions of this chapter benefited from comments by Larry Cuban, Catherine Crain-Thoreson, Pam Grossman, Bob Hampel, Debby Kerdeman, David Madsen, Susan Monas, Sheila Valencia, and Suzanne Wilson. An earlier version was presented at the MacArthur “Languages of Thinking” conference at Harvard University in October 1990. I thank David Olson for inviting me and for his ongoing encouragement.

近年来,关于学生阅读文献的研究成果颇丰。詹姆斯·F·沃斯(James F. Voss)的综述文章《历史学习中的问题》(“Issues in the Learning of History”),载于《教育问题:教育心理学贡献》(Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology)第4卷(1998年),第163-209页,概述了近期的发展。关于未来利用网络原始文献进行教学的创新观点,可参阅B·塔利(B. Tally)的《历史数字化:当网络进入课堂时如何教学》(“History Goes Digital: Teaching When the Web Is in the Classroom”),载于《D-Lib杂志》(1996年9月),网址:http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september96/09tally.html。

 

A great deal of work has come out in recent years on student's reading of documents. An overview of recent developments is the review by James F. Voss, “Issues in the Learning of History” Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology 4 (1998), 163–209. For a provocative view of the future of teaching with primary documents on the Web, see B. Tally, “History Goes Digital: Teaching When the Web Is in the Classroom” D-Lib Magazine (September 1996), online: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september96/09tally.html.

 

1. William B. Willcox,“一位历史学家眼中的社会变革”,载于 A. S. Eisenstadt 编,《美国历史的技艺》 (纽约,1966 年),第 25 页。

1. William B. Willcox, “An Historian Looks at Social Change” in A. S. Eisenstadt, ed., The Craft of American History (New York, 1966), 25.

2.关于历史学“入门指南”类书籍,可参阅亨利·斯蒂尔·康马杰的历史的本质与研究》(俄亥俄州哥伦布市,1966年);伍德·格雷的《历史学家手册:历史研究与写作的关键》(波士顿,1959年);艾伦·内文斯的《历史之门》(芝加哥,1962年);或R· 谢弗的《历史方法指南》(伊利诺伊州霍姆伍德,1969年)。格雷在书中略带神秘色彩地指出,阅读原始资料依赖于一种“第六感”,这种“第六感会提醒[历史学家]注意那些蛛丝马迹”(第36页)。这一趋势的两个显著例外是J· 赫克斯特的《历史入门》(纽约,1971年)以及詹姆斯·韦斯特·戴维森和马克·汉密尔顿·莱特尔合著的《事后:历史侦查的艺术》(纽约,1982年)。

2. For a sampling of “how to” books in history, see Henry Steele Commager, The Nature and Study of History (Columbus, Ohio, 1966); Wood Gray, Historian's Handbook: A Key to the Study and Writing of History (Boston, 1959); Allan Nevins, Gateway to History (Chicago, 1962); or R. J. Shafer, A Guide to Historical Method (Homewood, Ill., 1969). Gray waxes mystical when he says that the reading of primary sources relies on a “sort of sixth sense that will alert [historians] to the tell-tale signs ”(p. 36). Two notable exceptions to this trend are J. H. Hexter, The History Primer (New York, 1971), and James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (New York, 1982).

3.关于出声思考法及其原理的详细讨论,请参见 K. Anders Ericsson 和 Herbert A. Simon 合著的协议分析:口头报告作为数据》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1984 年)。另请参见 Michael Pressley 和 Peter Afflerbach 合著的《阅读的口头报告:建构性回应式阅读的本质》 (新泽西州希尔斯代尔,1995 年) ,该书也极具参考价值

3. For a detailed discussion of the think-aloud methodology and its rationale, see K. Anders Ericsson and Herbert A. Simon, Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). See as well the very useful book by Michael Pressley and Peter Afflerbach, Verbal Reports of Reading: The Nature of Constructively Responsive Reading (Hillsdale, N.J., 1995).

4.在我研究的八位历史学家中,六位拥有博士学位,两位是博士候选人。四位历史学家自认为是美国史专家(并且教过美国史),四位则不这么认为。博士培养而言,他们分别来自以下院校:威斯康星大学(3人)、斯坦福大学(2人)、加州大学伯克利分校(2人)和哈佛大学(1人)。

4. Of the eight historians I studied, six held the Ph.D. and two were doctoral candidates. Four historians considered themselves to be Americanists (and had taught American history), and four did not. In terms of doctoral training, the following institutions were represented: Wisconsin (3), Stanford (2), Berkeley (2), and Harvard (1).

5.有关这些文件的全文以及详细描述,请参阅有关所遵循的方法和程序,请参阅 Samuel S. Wineburg,“历史问题解决:对评估文献和图片证据所使用的认知过程的研究”,《教育心理学杂志》83 (1991),73-87。

5. For the full text of these documents, as well as a detailed description of the methods and procedures followed, see Samuel S. Wineburg, “Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence” Journal of Educational Psychology 83 (1991), 73–87.

6.沃伦的求职信可以在彼得·S·贝内特的《列克星顿绿地发生了什么?》(加利福尼亚州门洛帕克,1970 年)第 20 页找到。沃伦的宣传技巧在亚瑟·B·图特洛特的《列克星顿和康科德:美国革命战争的开始》(纽约,1963 年)第 212-236 页中有详细介绍。

6. Warren's cover letter can be found in Peter S. Bennett, What Happened on Lexington Green? (Menlo Park, Calif., 1970), 20. Warren's skills as a propagandist are detailed in Arthur B. Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution (New York, 1963), 212–36.

7. Jack 在这里指的是 Jack N. Rakove的专著《国家政治的开端》纽约,1976 年)。

7. Jack refers here to the monograph by Jack N. Rakove, The Beginning of National Politics (New York, 1976).

8.这些辨认问题出自美国历史教科书《美国民族的崛起》Lewis Paul Todd 和 Merle Curti 著,1982 年佛罗里达州奥兰多出版)。

8. These identification questions were drawn from a leading U.S. history textbook: Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti, Rise of the American Nation (Orlando, Fla., 1982).

9.这是弗雷德对沃伦的问候“朋友们和同胞们”的回应

9. These were Fred‘ words in response to Warren's salutation “Friends and Fellow Subjects.”

10. John Searle,“什么是言语行为?”载于 Max Black 编,《美国哲学》(伊萨卡,纽约,1965 年),第 221-39 页。

10. John Searle, “What Is a Speech Act?” in Max Black, ed., Philosophy in America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1965), 221–39.

11.虽然文本设计者的目标可能是写出清晰易懂的文字,但现实往往并非如此。关于从认知心理学的角度对历史教科书的批判,请参见 Isabel L. Beck、Margaret G. McKeown 和 Erika W. Gromoll 合著的《从社会研究文本中学习》,载于《认知与教学》 6 (1989),第 99-158 页。

11. While the goal of the text designer may be to write clear prose, the reality is often quite different. For a critique of history textbooks from the perspective of cognitive psychology, see Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Erika W. Gromoll, “Learning from Social Studies Texts” Cognition and Instruction 6 (1989), 99–158.

12. Samuel Steinberg,《美国:一个自由人民的故事》(波士顿,1963 年),第 92 页。转载于 Bennett,《发生了什么》,第 31 页。

12. Samuel Steinberg, The United States: A Story of a Free People (Boston, 1963), 92. Reprinted in Bennett, What Happened, 31.

13. Diane Ravitch 和 Chester E. Finn, Jr.,《我们的 17 岁青少年知道什么?第一次全国历史和文学评估报告》(纽约,1987 年),第 267-269 页。

13. Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report of the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York, 1987), 267–69.

14.这是第一章中简要描述的学生

14. This is the student briefly described in Chapter 1.

15.有时,先验知识会妨碍德里克对历史事件的理解。我在塞缪尔·S·温伯格的文章“探究学生历史知识的深度”中探讨了先验知识的弊端,该文章发表于《美国历史学会通讯》 30 (1992),第20-24页。

15. Sometimes prior knowledge got in the way of Derek's understanding of historical events. I explored the downside of prior knowledge in Samuel S. Wineburg, “Probing the Depths of Student's Historical Knowledge” Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 30 (1992), 20–24.

16. William S. Hall,“阅读理解”,美国心理学家》 44(1989),157-61。

16. William S. Hall, “Reading Comprehension” American Psychologist 44 (1989), 157–61.

17. Annemarie Palincsar 和 Ann Brown,“理解促进和理解监控活动的互惠教学”,《认知与教学》 1 (1984),117–75。另见 Alan Collins 和 Edward E. Smith,“阅读理解过程的教学”,载于 Douglas K. Detterman 和 Robert J. Sternberg 编,《如何以及能提高多少智力》(新泽西州诺伍德,1982 年),173–85。

17. Annemarie Palincsar and Ann Brown, “Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities” Cognition and Instruction 1 (1984), 117–75. See also Alan Collins and Edward E. Smith, “Teaching the Process of Reading Comprehension” in Douglas K. Detterman and Robert J. Sternberg, eds., How and How Much Can Intelligence Be Increased (Norwood, N.J., 1982), 173–85.

18.罗兰·巴特,《S/Z》(纽约,1974 年)。另见巴特关于历史文本本质的挑衅性论文《历史话语》,载于迈克尔·莱恩编,《结构主义导论》纽约,1970 年),第 145-155 页。

18. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York, 1974). Also see Barthe's provocative paper on the nature of historical texts, “Historical Discourse” in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (New York, 1970), 145–55.

19. David Harlan,“思想史与文学的回归”,美国历史评论》 94(1989),597。

19. David Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature” American Historical Review 94 (1989), 597.

20.参见列夫·维果茨基,《社会中的思维》,迈克尔·科尔、维拉·约翰-施泰纳、西尔维娅·斯克里布纳和艾伦·苏伯曼编辑(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1978 年)。

20. See Lev S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society, ed. Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).

21. Walker Gibson,“作者、演讲者、读者和模拟读者”,《大学英语》 11(1950),265-69。另见 Louise M. Rosenblatt,《读者、文本、诗歌》(伊利诺伊州卡本代尔,1978),131-75。

21. Walker Gibson, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers” College English 11 (1950), 265–69. See also Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem (Carbondale, Ill., 1978), 131–75.

22.这一点来自艾伦·H·舍恩菲尔德,他在与数学专家合作的过程中也发现了类似的现象。参见他的《数学问题求解》佛罗里达州奥兰多,1985 年),第 140-141 页。

22. This point is from Alan H. Schoenfeld, who recognized a similar phenomenon in his work with expert mathematicians. See his Mathematical Problem Solving (Orlando, Fla., 1985), 140–41.

23.多米尼克·拉卡普拉认为,历史学家“与过去进行‘对话式的交流’”,并与“通过其‘文本化’的遗存而得以重构的逝者进行对话”。参见他的著作《历史与批评》 (伊萨卡,纽约,1985年)。此引文出自第37页。

23. Dominick LaCapra says that historians “enter into a ‘conversational's exchange with the past” and engage in “a dialogue with the dead who are reconstituted through their ‘textualized’ remainders.” See his History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985). This quotation appears on p. 37.

24. F. B. Dexter 编,埃兹拉·斯泰尔斯的文学日记》(纽约,1901 年)。

24. F. B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diaries of Ezra Stiles (New York, 1901).

25.为了便于阅读,对引文稍作修改。

25. This quotation has been edited slightly for readability.

26.感谢大卫·马德森指出汤姆的错误:埃兹拉·斯泰尔斯和耶鲁大学是公理会教徒,而不是圣公会教徒

26. I thank David Madsen for pointing out Tom's error: Ezra Stiles and Yale were Congregationalist, not Episcopalian.

27.有关在不同背景下提出的相关观点,请参阅 Margaret S. Steffensen、Chitra JoagDev 和 Richard C. Anderson 的文章“阅读理解的跨文化视角”,《阅读研究季刊》 15 (1979),10-29。

27. For a related point made in a different context, see Margaret S. Steffensen, Chitra JoagDev, and Richard C. Anderson, “A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Reading Comprehension” Reading Research Quarterly 15 (1979), 10–29.

28.参见亨利·斯蒂尔·康马杰在其著作《历史研究》中对弗里曼的讨论康马杰总结了他对弗里曼方法的徒劳性的看法,如下:“接受我们的局限性,用现在的眼光看待过去,有很多好处,但最有说服力的一点是:无论我们多么努力,我们最终还是会这样做”(第59页)。

28. See the discussion of Freeman in Henry Steele Commager's Study of History. Commager summed up his views on the futility of Freeman's approach this way: “There are many things to be said for accepting our limitations and looking at the past through the eyes of the present, but this is the most persuasive: no matter how hard we try, that is what we do anyway” (p. 59).

29. Carl L. Becker,“什么是历史事实?”载于 Hans Meyerhoff 编,《我们时代的历史哲学》纽约州花园城,1959 年),第 132 页。

29. Carl L. Becker, “What Are Historical Facts?” in Hans Meyerhoff, ed., The Philosophy of History in Our Time (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 132.

30.这一比喻出自罗宾·G·科林伍德的《历史的观念》牛津,1946)。科林伍德(第249页)指出:“正如自然科学在科学家(用培根的比喻来说)向自然提出问题时找到了其恰当的方法……历史学也在历史学家将权威人士置于证人席上,并通过交叉质询从他们那里获取信息时找到了其恰当的方法,这些信息在他们最初的陈述中要么是因为他们不想提供,要么是因为他们根本不掌握。”科林伍德追随了伏尔泰的脚步,伏尔泰曾写道:“阅读历史时,一个头脑健全的人唯一该做的就是反驳它。”

30. This metaphor comes from Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946). Collingwood (p. 249) noted, “As natural science finds its proper method when the scientist, in Bacon's metaphor, puts Nature to the question…so history finds its proper method when the historian puts his authorities in the witness-box, and by cross-questioning extorts from them information which in their original statements they have withheld, either because they did not wish to give it or because they did not possess it.” Collingwood follows in the footsteps of Voltaire, who wrote that “when reading history, it is but the only business of a healthy mind to refute it.”

31. Peter Schrag,“课堂上的声音:教科书被阉割的声音”,星期六评论》 21(1967 年 1 月),74。关于历史教科书的类似观点,请参阅 Frances FitzGerald 的《修订版美国》(纽约,1980 年),尤其是第149-218 页。

31. Peter Schrag, “Voices in the Classroom: The Emasculated Voice of the Textbook” Saturday Review 21 (January 1967), 74. For a similar view of the history textbook, see Frances FitzGerald's America Revised (New York, 1980), especially pp. 149–218.

32. Avon Crismore,“教科书的修辞:元话语”,课程研究杂志》16(1984),295。

32. Avon Crismore, “The Rhetoric of Textbooks: Metadiscourse” Journal of Curriculum Studies 16 (1984), 295.

33. James L. Lorence,“文献证据的批判性分析:历史课堂中的基本技能”,《历史教学》 8,第2 期(1983 年),78。

33. James L. Lorence, “The Critical Analysis of Documentary Evidence: Basic Skills in the History Classroom” History Teaching 8, no. 2 (1983), 78.

34.参见 Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.,“揭开历史权威的神秘面纱:课堂上的批判性文本分析” ,《视角:美国历史学会通讯》 26 (1988 年 2 月),13-16 页。

34. See Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “Demystifying Historical Authority: Critical Textual Analysis in the Classroom” Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 26 (February 1988), 13–16.

35. Christina Haas 和 Linda Flower,“修辞阅读策略与意义的建构”,《大学写作与交流》 39(1988 年 5 月),30-47。关于阅读法律文本的例子,参见 Elizabeth Fajans 和 Mary R. Falk,“反对释义的暴政:反驳文本”,《康奈尔法律评论》 78(1993 年),163-205。

35. Christina Haas and Linda Flower, “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning” College Composition and Communication 39 (May 1988), 30–47. For an example from the world of reading legal texts, see Elizabeth Fajans and Mary R. Falk, “Against the Tyranny of Paraphrase: Talking Back to Texts” Cornell Law Review 78 (1993), 163–205.

36.请参阅本书第 6 章

36. See Chapter 6 in this volume.

37.请参阅莱昂内尔·戈斯曼 (Lionel Gossman )的《历史与文学之间》(Between History and Literature )(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1990 年)中关于“历史的理性”的章节。

37. See the chapter on “The Rationality of History” in Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

38.例如,参见《社会教育》杂志上一篇题为“利用文献进行教学”的专栏文章,其中作者转载了一份关于内战期间护士招募的政策声明。文件包含以下声明:“经验丰富、品行良好或受过高等教育且性格严肃的成熟女性将优先考虑。整洁、稳重和勤奋是必备条件。”在关于教学活动的章节中,作者并未提及这份文件的弦外之音以及如何指导学生解读其含义。相反,他们推荐了诸如以下活动:“让学生讨论如今护士需要具备哪些资格”或“让学生寻找证据来支持或反驳以下观点:内战是美国历史上最血腥的战争。”参见 Wynell Burroughs、Jean Mueller 和 Jean Preer 合著的《利用文献进行教学:美国卫生局局长办公室》,载于《社会教育》第 66 卷(1988 年 1 月),第 66-68 页。

38. See, for example, a column on “teaching with documents” in Social Education in which the authors reprinted a policy statement on the recruitment of nurses during the Civil War. The document included the following statement, “Matronly persons of experience, good conduct or superior education and serious disposition, will always have a preference. Habits of neatness, sobriety, and industry are prerequisites.” In their section on teaching activities, the authors make no reference to the subtext of this document and how students could be taught to decipher it. Instead, such activities as the following are recommended: “Ask your students to discuss what qualifications are necessary for a nurse today” or “Ask students to locate evidence to support or disprove the following: The Civil War was the bloodiest war in American history.” See Wynell Burroughs, Jean Mueller, and Jean Preer, “Teaching with Documents: Surgeon General's Office” Social Education 66 (January 1988), 66–68.

39. John Seely Brown、Alan Collins 和 Paul Duguid,“情境认知与学习文化”,教育研究者》 18 (1989),32-42。

39. John Seely Brown, Alan Collins, and Paul Duguid, “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning” Educational Researcher 18 (1989), 32–42.

40.同上

40. Ibid.

41. H. Alan Robinson,《阅读、写作和学习策略教学:内容领域》波士顿,1983 年),第 181 页。

41. H. Alan Robinson, Teaching Reading, Writing, and Study Strategies: The Content Areas (Boston, 1983), 181.

42.参见 Gregory G. Colomb,“文化素养与意义理论:或教育理论家需要了解我们如何阅读” 新文学史》 20 (1988),411–50。

42. See Gregory G. Colomb, “Cultural Literacy and the Theory of Meaning: or, What Educational Theorists Need to Know About How We Read” New Literary History 20 (1988), 411–50.

43. Louis O. Mink,“理解模式与知识的统一性”,载于 Brian Fay、Eugene O. Golob和 Richard T. Vann 编,《历史理解》(伊萨卡,纽约,1987 年),第 36 页。

43. Louis O. Mink, “Modes of Comprehension and the Unity of Knowledge” in Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann, eds., Historical Understanding (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), 36.

44.其他人也讨论过一些对阅读理解测试的批评。例如,参见 Peter Winograd 和 Peter Johnston 的《关于推进阅读理解教学的思考》,载于教育心理学家》 22 (1987),第 219-220 页。关于阅读理解的新方法,参见 Rand J. Spiro、Walter P. Vispoel、John G. Schmitz、Ala Samarapungavan 和 A. E. Boerger 的《知识获取与应用:复杂内容领域的认知灵活性与迁移》,载于 Bruce K. Britton 和 Shawn W. Glynn 主编的《阅读中的执行控制过程》(新泽西州希尔斯代尔,1987 年),尤其是第184-193 页。

44. Some of these criticisms of comprehension tests have been discussed by others. See, for example, Peter Winograd and Peter Johnston, “Considerations for Advancing the Teaching of Reading Comprehension” Educational Psychologist 22 (1987), 219–20. For a fresh approach to comprehension, see Rand J. Spiro, Walter P. Vispoel, John G. Schmitz, Ala Samarapungavan, and A. E. Boerger, “Knowledge Acquisition for Application: Cognitive Flexibility and Transfer in Complex Content Domains” in Bruce K. Britton and Shawn W. Glynn, eds., Executive Control Processes in Reading (Hillsdale, N.J., 1987), especially pp. 184–93.

45.如果我们看看其他以阅读为生的人——例如文学评论家——我们可能会得出另一种理解的形象。

45. If we looked at others who read for a living—literary critics, to name one group—we would probably arrive at still another image of comprehension.

46. Robert Linn,引自 Mary E. Curtis 和 Robert Glaser,“阅读理论与阅读成就的评估”,《教育测量杂志》 20 (1983 年夏季),133-47。

46. Robert Linn, cited in Mary E. Curtis and Robert Glaser, “Reading Theory and the Assessment of Reading Achievement” Journal of Educational Measurement 20 (Summer 1983), 133–47.

47.参见布拉德利学校历史委员会的《构建历史课程:学校历史教学指南》(华盛顿特区,1988 年)及其更完整的声明《历史素养:美国教育中历史的案例》保罗·A·加尼翁编辑(纽约,1989 年)。

47. See the Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools (Washington, D.C., 1988) along with its fuller statement, Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, ed. Paul A. Gagnon (New York, 1989).

48. Louis R. Harlan,“社会研究改革与历史学家”,《美国历史杂志》 77 (1990),801–11。Harlan的一些提议,例如呼吁举办暑期研修班,让教师们能够“通过学习最新、最优秀的史学研究成果来重振教学”(第809 页),这些提议本身或许可以从过去的经验教训中获益。关于 20 世纪 60 年代大规模历史研修班影响的悲观评价,参见 Karen B. Wiley 和 Jeanne Race合著的《大学预科科学、数学和社会科学教育现状:1955–1975》,第 3 卷社会学。 科学教育(博尔德,1977 年)。有关这些研究所影响力如此之小的原因的分析,请参阅 Richard H. Brown 的文章“历史作为发现:阿默斯特计划的临时报告”,载于 Edwin Fenton 主编的《中学新社会研究教学:归纳方法》(纽约,1966 年),第 443-451 页。

48. Louis R. Harlan, “Social Studies Reform and the Historian” Journal of American History 77 (1990), 801–11. Some of Harlan's proposals, such as the call for summer institutes in which teachers can “revitalize their teaching by learning of the latest and best historical scholarship” (p. 809), may themselves benefit from the lessons of the past. For a gloomy assessment of the impact of the large-scale history institutes of the 1960s, see Karen B. Wiley and Jeanne Race, The Status of Pre-college Science, Mathematics, and Social Science Education: 1955–1975, vol. 3: Social Science Education (Boulder, 1977). For an analysis of why these institutes had so little influence, see Richard H. Brown, “History as Discovery: An Interim Report on the Amherst Project” in Edwin Fenton, ed., Teaching the New Social Studies in Secondary Schools: An Inductive Approach (New York, 1966), 443–51.

49. James L. Sellers,“在我们成为会员之前——密西西比河谷历史协会”密西西比河谷历史评论40 (1953),21。

49. James L. Sellers, “Before We Were Members—the MVHA” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40 (1953), 21.

50.参见 Suzanne M. Wilson 的论文“历史教育学:研究建议”,该论文于 1990 年在华盛顿特区举行的 FIPSE/FIRST 会议上发表

50. See Suzanne M. Wilson, “The Pedagogy of History: A Recommendation for Research” paper presented at the FIPSE/FIRST Conference, Washington, D.C., 1990.

51. Lee S. Shulman,“知识与教学:新改革的基础”,哈佛教育评论》 57(1987),1-22。

51. Lee S. Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform” Harvard Educational Review 57 (1987), 1–22.

52. Tom Holt,《历史思维:叙事、想象与理解》纽约,1990 年)。另见 Richard J. Paxton 和 Sam Wineburg,“历史教学”,载于 Miriam Ben-Peretz、Sally Brown 和 Robert Moon 编,《劳特利奇国际教育指南》(伦敦,2000 年)。

52. Tom Holt, Thinking Historically: Narrative, Imagination, and Understanding (New York, 1990). See also Richard J. Paxton and Sam Wineburg, “History Teaching” in Miriam Ben-Peretz, Sally Brown, and Robert Moon, eds., Routledge International Companion to Education (London, 2000).

53.霍尔特,《历史思维》第13页。

53. Holt, Thinking Historically, 13.

54.美国历史学会的一个工作组也得出了同样的结论:“关于大学生的认知能力,以及这些能力如何使他们能够学习历史,我们知之甚少。工作组敦促就此主题开展研究。研究结果将极大地促进对历史专业及其教学方式的重新思考。” 《视角:美国历史学会通讯》 30(1990 年 5 月/6 月),18。

54. A task force of the American Historical Association reached the same conclusion: “Concerning the cognitive abilities of students of college age that equip them to learn history, our knowledge is meager. The task force urges that research on this topic be undertaken. The findings would contribute much to the rethinking of the history major and the manner in which history courses are taught” Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 30 (May/June 1990), 18.

55.参见 Suzanne M. Wilson,“乳齿象、地图与密歇根:探索小学社会研究教学中的未知领域”,小学学科中心系列技术报告第24号(ED 326470),密歇根州立大学教学研究所(东兰辛,1990 年)。另见 Martin Booth,“年龄与概念:对皮亚杰历史教学方法的批判”,载于 Christopher Portal 主编的《教师历史课程》 (伦敦,1987 年),第 22-38 页。另见我的评论文章“部分历史”,《教学与教师教育》 14(1998 年),第 233-243 页。

55. See Suzanne M. Wilson, “Mastodons, Maps and Michigan: Exploring Uncharted Territory While Teaching Elementary School Social Studies,” Elementary Subject Center Series, Technical Report no. 24 (ED 326470), Institute for Research on Teaching, Michigan State University (East Lansing, 1990). See also Martin Booth, “Ages and Concepts: A Critique of the Piagetian Approach to History Teaching” in Christopher Portal, ed., The History Curriculum for Teachers (London, 1987), 22–38. See as well my essay review “A Partial History” Teaching and Teacher Education 14 (1998), 233–43.

56.卡尔·贝克尔,《人人都是自己的历史学家》,《美国历史评论》 37(1932),221-36。

56. Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian” American Historical Review 37 (1932), 221–36.

57.正如查尔斯·巴泽曼所论证的那样,即使是像核酸分子结构研究笔记这样看似简单的文本,也传达了关于知识地位和认知者角色的信念。参见他对文本潜台词的精妙解读,见《书面知识的作用:学术话语的三个例子》,载《社会科学哲学》第11卷(1981年),第361-387页。另见盖伊·格拉格森和杰克·塞尔泽合著的《生物学学术文章读者的虚构化》,载《书面交流》第7卷(1990年1月),第25-58页。

57. As Charles Bazerman has argued, even such straightforward texts as research notes on the molecular structure of nucleic acids communicate beliefs about the status of knowledge and the role of the knower. See his artful reading of subtexts in “What Written Knowledge Does: Three Examples of Academic Discourse” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (1981), 361–87. See also Gay Gragson end Jack Selzer, “Fictionalizing the Readers of Scholarly Articles in Biology” Written Communication 7 (January 1990), 25–58.

58. Iris M. Tiedt、Jo E. Carlson、Bert D. Howard 和 Kathleen S. Oda Wan-tanable,《K-12 课堂中教授思维技能》(Needham Heights, Mass., 1989 年)。

58. Iris M. Tiedt, Jo E. Carlson, Bert D. Howard, and Kathleen S. Oda Wan-tanable, Teaching Thinking Skills in K-12 Classrooms (Needham Heights, Mass., 1989).

59. Robert Scholes,《文本的力量:文学理论与英语教学》纽黑文,1985 年),第 14 页。

59. Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven, 1985), 14.

4

4

阅读亚伯拉罕·林肯

Reading Abraham Lincoln

情境化思维案例研究

A Case Study in Contextualized Thinking

本章的早期版本曾发表于 Mario Carretero 和 James F. Voss 主编的《历史和社会科学中的认知和教学过程》(新泽西州希尔斯代尔,1994 年)。经 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 许可转载。

An earlier version of this chapter was previously published in Mario Carretero and James F. Voss, eds., Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences (Hillsdale, N.J., 1994). Reprinted by permission of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

想象一下亚伯拉罕·林肯那瘦长的身影,这位来自肯塔基州的美国第十六任总统,人称“诚实的亚伯”,曾任南北战争期间的总司令,也是美国历史上最重要的文件之一——《解放奴隶宣言》的起草者。请思考一下这位常被誉为“伟大的解放者”的人物,就种族关系问题所作的以下言论。

Conjure up in your mind the lanky figure of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, “Honest Abe” from Kentucky, commander in chief during the Civil War, and author of one of the most important documents in I American history—the Emancipation Proclamation. Consider these words on the topic of race relations from the man often referred to as the “Great Emancipator.”

我无意在白人和黑人之间推行政治和社会平等。两者之间存在生理差异,依我之见,这种差异或许永远无法使他们在完全平等的基础上共同生活既然这种差异不可避免,那么我……赞成我所属的种族拥有优越的地位。我从未说过任何相反的话。

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I…am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.1

我们该如何看待这些话?至少,它们使林肯作为非裔美国人开明恩人的形象变得复杂化。我们是否被蒙蔽了?这位美国“守护圣人”的形象是否只是个骗局?或许,正如勒罗内·贝内特在黑人权力运动鼎盛时期所宣称的那样,林肯作为“伟大解放者”的形象应该被林肯作为“白人至上主义者”的形象所取代

How are we to regard these words? At the very least they complicate the image of Lincoln as enlightened benefactor of African Americans. Have we been duped? Is the image of this American “patron saint” a sham? Perhaps, as Lerone Bennett claimed at the height of the Black Power movement, the image of Lincoln as “Great Emancipator” should be replaced by the image of Lincoln as “White Supremacist.”2

“伟大的解放者”还是“白人至上主义者”?我们该如何回答这个问题?我们对历史的哪些假设能够(或阻碍)让我们充分理解林肯并做出判断?

“Great Emancipator” or “White Supremacist”? How would we even go about answering such a question? What assumptions about the past enable us (or make it impossible for us) to understand Lincoln well enough to render judgment?

以当今的标准评判过去的事件,会将他们从自身的语境中剥离出来,并使他们受制于我们而非他们自身形成的思维模式。这种以当下视角看待过去的思维方式,是一种默认的心理状态,必须克服才能获得成熟的历史理解。1989年的布拉德利委员会承诺,历史研究能够提升人们“感知过去事件和问题在当时人们眼中的意义……培养历史同理心而非当下思维”的能力。³我们思考希望学生学习(进而教师也应具备)的基本学科理解时,能够以历史自身的视角思考过去无疑是其中之一。如果历史教师都无法“以历史的视角思考”,我们就很难相信他们的学生能够学会这种能力。

Judging past actors by present standards wrests them from their own context and subjects them to ways of thinking that we, not they, have developed. Presentism, the act of viewing the past through the lens of the present, is a psychological default state that must be overcome before one achieves mature historical understanding. The 1989 Bradley Commission promised that historical study sharpens the ability to “perceive past events and issues as they were experienced by people at the time…the develop[ment] of historical empathy as opposed to present mindedness.”3 When we consider the fundamental disciplinary understandings we want students to learn and, by extension, teachers to possess, the ability to think about the past on its own terms is certainly among them. If teachers of history cannot “think in time” we can have little faith in their student's ability to learn to do so.

这种情境化的思考方式是什么样的?我们又该如何促进它的发展?如果我的目标是让读者在本章开头就进行情境化思考,那么我犯下的最大错误莫过于断章取义地展示林肯的话语,而忽略任何相关的细节。因为情境化思考意味着,文字并非脱离时空、脱离语境的符号。我们不能将林肯在本章开头的话语与其发表的场合(与斯蒂芬·A·道格拉斯的辩论,道格拉斯是林肯在竞争激烈的参议员席位上的对手)、辩论的地点(伊利诺伊州渥太华,一个反黑人情绪高涨的地方)、辩论的旁听者(他们大多支持道格拉斯,对林肯抱有怀疑)以及林肯和道格拉斯都以候选人的身份而非先知或道德家的身份与这些人交谈这一事实割裂开来。我们也不能忽视道格拉斯引发林肯回应的言论,以及林肯在引用这段话之后紧接着说的话。那么,林肯一周前在伊利诺伊州哈瓦那,以及一周后在伊利诺伊州弗里波特发表的其他言论又该如何解释呢?当我们思考如何为本章开头这段简短的文字构建历史背景时,这些考量仅仅是冰山一角。

What does such contextualized thinking look like, and how can we promote its development? Had my goal been for readers to think contextually at the beginning of this chapter, I could have committed no graver error than to display Lincoln's words shorn of any qualifying detail. For to think contextually means that words are not disembodied symbols transcending time and space. We cannot separate Lincoln's words at the beginning of this chapter from the occasion on which they were uttered (a debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's rival for a fiercely contested senatorial seat), the location of this debate (Ottawa, Illinois, a hotbed of antiblack sentiment), the kinds of people who witnessed the debate (largely supportive of Douglas and suspicious of Lincoln), and the fact that both Lincoln and Douglas addressed these people not as prophets or moralists but as candidates courting votes. Nor can we ignore what Douglas said to spark Lincoln's response, or the words Lincoln uttered immediately following the passage quoted. And what about the other things Lincoln said in Havana, Illinois, a week earlier, or in Freeport, Illinois, a week later? Such considerations just begin to scratch the surface when we think about what we would need to create a historical context for the brief passage heading this chapter.

为了构建林肯言论的语境,我主要集中于拼凑时间和空间背景:即当时的具体情况,这些情况或许可以解释林肯的动机和意图。但其他形式的语境——舆论氛围、心态时代精神;传记林肯是一个复杂的人,他的言辞风格以及 19 世纪 50 年代的语言习惯——在思考林肯的话语的含义时,也必须加以考虑。

In trying to weave a context for Lincoln's words, I have focused mostly on piecing together the temporal and spatial context: the exigencies of the moment that might explain Lincoln's motivation and intention. But other forms of context—the climate of opinion, mentalité, or Zeitgeist; the biography of a complex human being and his style with words and utterances; the linguistic practices of the 1850s—must also be considered when thinking about the meaning of Lincoln's words.

读者如何利用我们称之为一手史料的过往碎片来构建历史语境?鉴于文献证据的片面性和省略性,如何从中形成连贯的解读?我们需要哪些知识才能进行这样的解读?正规学习在语境化思维的发展中扮演着怎样的角色?而如果无法构建语境又会如何?“非语境化”或时代错置的思维是什么样的?哪些信念和过程会产生并维持时代错置的思维?这些问题正是本研究的出发点。我们将其视为一种“应用认识论”,因为它既不属于现有的心理学研究范畴,也不属于任何形式的学院派历史研究。

How do readers use the fragments of the past that we call primary sources to weave historical contexts? How are coherent interpretations formed from documentary evidence, given its partial and elliptical nature? What kinds of knowledge are needed to produce such interpretations? What is the role of formal study in the development of contextualized thinking? And what about the inability to create a context? What does “noncontextualized” or anachronistic, thinking look like? What beliefs and processes give rise to and sustain anachronistic thinking? These were some of the questions that motivated this study, an enterprise we have come to think of as a form of “applied epistemology” because it neither falls into existing categories of psychological work nor qualifies as anything resembling academic history.

打结;或者说,认知任务与深海捕鱼有哪些共同之处

TYING KNOTS; OR, WHAT COGNITIVE TASKS SHARE WITH DEEP SEA FISHING

观察情境化思维比看起来要复杂得多。我们可以尝试从历史学家的文字记载中推断,但这种方法几乎无法揭示那些促成复杂推理的关键决策点。历史学家在发表的作品中删去了他们的直觉、犹豫不决的最初尝试、失误以及徒劳无功的探索。然而,或许正是这些朴实无华、未经雕琢的历史思考,为我们理解复杂历史思维的形成提供了最佳线索。如果是这样,我们就必须找到某种方法来捕捉人们进行情境化思维的过程——在解释出现之前的困惑时刻,在犹豫不决和怀疑弥漫、逻辑连贯性难以捉摸的时期。认知任务正是在此发挥作用,它提供了一个可控的环境,使我们能够在可控的条件下研究那些在实地考察中难以把握的现象。4

Observing contextualized thinking is more complicated than it might seem. We can try to infer it from historian's written accounts, but this approach discloses few clues about the crucial decision points that allow sophisticated reasoning to emerge. Historians edit out from their published works their hunches and faltering first steps, their miscues and fruitless pursuits down blind alleys. Yet it may be such homey and unshorn aspects of historical thought that provide the best clues about how sophisticated historical thinking emerges. If this is the case, some way has to be found to capture people in the act of contextualized thinking—in the moments of confusion before an interpretation emerges, while indecision and doubt reign and coherence remains elusive. Here is where the cognitive task comes in, an environment that allows us to study under controlled conditions phenomena that are irritatingly hard to grasp in the field.4

即使已经明确了一系列研究问题,任务发布者面临的选择仍然无穷无尽。研究哪个时期、引用哪些文献、涵盖多少种文体等等——可能性似乎无穷无尽。面对这种复杂性,一种应对方式是干脆放弃,承认任何选择都是任意的,不再过分纠结于主题、文体和时期的选择。在这种情况下,任何一组文献都一样好。

The choices before the task maker are endless, even when a set of research questions has been specified. Which time period to study, which documents to draw on, how many genres to include, and so on—the vistas of possibility are limitless. One response to this complexity is to throw up one's hands, recognize that any choice is arbitrary, and refuse to be overly concerned with decisions of topic, genre, and time period. In this case, one set of documents is as good as any other.

我的观点恰恰相反。设计一项旨在考察历史推理能力的任务,可以比作打渔网的结——最艰难的工作始于干船坞。如果渔民打的结太大,无法容纳他们想要捕获的猎物,最终只会捕到各种毫无价值的生物,而真正有价值的东西却会悄无声息地从网中溜走。如果结太小,渔网里就会混入大量的浮游生物和海藻,以至于那些被困在网中的大型生物都被遮蔽了。因此,打结不仅是一个繁琐的过程,更需要极其清晰的目标。任务设计亦是如此。在设计这项任务时,我们力求探索情境化思维,因此选择了一个既与当下息息相关又与之相距甚远的主题和时期,因为情境化思维的核心在于意识到与过去的连续性和断裂性。出于这种考虑,我们排除了诸如盎格鲁-撒克逊人的苦难(与当代经验过于遥远)以及约翰·肯尼迪遇刺(与我们时代过于接近,且已被过度曝光)等话题。5我们选择探讨林肯的种族观,是因为种族问题在美国社会根深蒂固,但只有从历史的角度才能理解。6我们的文献集始于竞选演讲中的一段对话,这是十九世纪美国生活的一个特征,与现代竞选活动有很多共同之处。另一方面,辩论的主题——奴隶的地位和奴隶制的正当性——对于现代人来说却是一个难以理解的问题。

I hold the opposite position. Designing a task to capture historical reasoning can be likened to tying the knots of a fishing seine—the hardest work begins in dry dock. If fishermen's knots are too big for the prizes they seek, they will end up with all sorts of worthless creatures, while the real beauties slip unnoticed through the net. If the knots are too small, the nets will yield so much plankton and seaweed that the larger beasts lodged in the catch will be obscured. Tying knots, then, is not just a tedious process, but one that demands tremendous clarity of purpose. So it is with task design. In putting together this task, we sought to explore contextualized thinking by choosing a topic and period that was at once close to and remote from present concerns, for the heart of contextualized thinking is an awareness of continuity and discontinuity with the past. This consideration eliminated topics such as Anglo-Saxon ordeals, too remote from contemporary experience, and the assassination of John Kennedy, too close to our time (as well as being overexposed).5 We chose to explore Lincoln's views about race because race is an enduring issue in American society, but one that can only be understood historically.6 Our set of documents began with an exchange on the campaign stump, a feature of nineteenth-century American life that has much in common with modern electioneering. On the other hand, the topic under debate—the status of the slave and the justification for slavery—is an issue difficult for the modern mind to fathom.

我们在文档集中构建了一个递进式结构,因为历史推理被认为是一种归纳推理,即“推导出特定问题的答案,以获得令人满意的‘契合’”。 7我们设计的这项任务,使得提供给读者的文档越来越复杂,希望借此观察人们如何推导出能够解释日益复杂情况的历史解释。在最终选定文档之前,我们审阅了林肯及其同时代人物的一千多篇演讲、信件、笔记和讲话。

We built a progression into our document set because historical reasoning has been referred to as adductive, a process of “adducing answers to specific questions so that a satisfactory ‘fit’ is obtained.”7 We constructed the task so that the documents we provided to readers became increasingly complex, hoping thereby to see how historical explanations that account for increasing complexity are adduced. Before selecting the final documents, we reviewed well over a thousand speeches, letters, notes, and addresses by Lincoln and his contemporaries.

参与者

PARTICIPANTS

本章的数据来源于一项关于不同人群(包括优秀高中生、新教师和经验丰富的教师,以及拥有不同专业领域的历史学家——参见第一章)如何看待历史文本的大型研究。本章的讨论重点是两位未来公立学校教师的思考,他们来自华盛顿大学五年制教师资格认证项目中的更大样本。该项目要求所有申请者……两人均拥有文科学士学位。泰德,32岁,白人男性,本科主修历史,计划毕业后从事历史/社会研究教师的工作。艾伦,34岁,白人女性,本科主修物理,在开始教师教育项目之前曾在私营部门工作过一段时间。泰德的本科课程设置与我们选取的12位准教师样本中历史专业学生的典型情况相符。他的学习项目包括古代史、拉丁美洲近代史、非裔美国人史、女性史以及伊朗史研讨课,此外还有其他必修的概论课程。艾伦为了满足大学的通识教育要求,修读了两门历史课程。由于修读课程的数量通常被用作衡量学科知识水平的指标,因此比较“高知识水平”和“低知识水平”的个体似乎是一个值得探讨的方向。

The data for this chapter were drawn from a larger study on how different people (gifted high school students, beginning and experienced teachers, and historians with diverse specializations—see Chapter 1) think about historical texts. Here the discussion focuses on the thinking of two prospective public school teachers, drawn from a larger sample of pre-service teachers enrolled in a fifth-year teacher certification program at the University of Washington. The program requires all applicants to possess a bachelor's degree in a liberal arts discipline. Ted, a thirty-two-year-old white male, majored in history as an undergraduate and planned to find work as a history/social studies teacher upon graduation. Ellen, a thirty-four-year-old white female, was a physics major who had spent considerable time in the private sector before beginning her teacher education program. Ted's undergraduate course work was typical of the history majors in our larger sample of twelve prospective teachers. His program of study included ancient history, modern Latin American history, Afro-American history, women's history, and a seminar on the history of Iran, as well as other required survey courses. Ellen had taken two history courses as part of her college's distribution requirements. Because the number of courses taken is widely used as a proxy for subject matter knowledge, a comparison between “high-knowledge” and “low-knowledge” individuals seemed an interesting route to pursue.

程序

PROCEDURE

在利用林肯文献进行“出声思考”练习之前,我们采访了所有参与研究的教师,了解他们之前的历史课程学习情况,特别是大学阶段的课程。之后,我们教他们如何进行“出声思考”练习,并向他们展示了一份包含六条规则的清单,这些规则摘自大卫·N·珀金斯(David N. Perkins)的著作这些规则包括“想到什么就说什么”、“不要过度解释或辩解”以及“不必担心句子是否完整”等指导原则

Prior to engaging in a think-aloud task using the Lincoln documents, all of the teachers in our study were interviewed about their prior historical course work, particularly at the university level. We then taught them how to “think aloud”8 and showed them a list of six rules to “keep in mind” taken from the work of David N. Perkins.9 These rules included guidelines such as “say whatever's on your mind” “don't over-explain or justify” and “don't worry about complete sentences.”10

我的目标是为读者重现语境化思考的过程。本文的呈现方式是循序渐进的,遵循呈现给两位教师的文件顺序。我邀请读者“站在两位教师的视角”来阅读,思考他们会如何将文件联系起来,或者尝试为林肯的言论构建语境。虽然完整的思考过程涵盖了127年间撰写的七份文件,但由于篇幅限制,我们在此仅探讨第五份文件。与泰德和艾伦一同参与讨论的,还有一些研究林肯和美国种族关系的重要学者,例如温斯罗普·乔丹、乔治·弗雷德里克森、唐·E·费伦巴赫、理查德·韦弗、理查德·霍夫施塔特等人。

My goal here is to recreate for the reader the unfolding of contextualized thinking. The presentation is sequential, following the order of the documents presented to the teachers. I invite readers to “read over the shoulders” of these two teachers, asking themselves how they would link document to document or try to weave a context for Lincoln's words. Although the full think-aloud task spans seven documents written over a 127-year period, space limitations prevent us from going beyond the fifth document here. Joining Ted and Ellen are the voices of some of the major interpreters of Lincoln and race relations in the United States: Winthrop Jordan, George Fredrickson, Don E. Fehrenbacher, Richard Weaver, Richard Hofstadter, and others.

思想的图像

IMAGES OF THOUGHT

第一份文件出自斯蒂芬·A·道格拉斯之手,他是林肯在1858年参议员竞选中的对手。文件开头,道格拉斯声称:林肯支持赋予奴隶选举权、竞选公职的权利以及担任陪审员的权利。道格拉斯在提出这些主张时,确立了自己的立场,即“主张将公民权限制在白人男性”,并反对“任何形式的”黑人公民权。他随后声称,林肯认为“黑人生来与白人平等”,并且“全能的上帝赋予了他们平等的权利”。文件4.1展示了该文件呈现给读者的原貌。

The first document was by Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's opponent in the 1858 senatorial campaign. It begins with Douglas claiming that Lincoln supported giving the franchise to slaves and the right to run for public office and serve on juries. In making these claims, Douglas established his own position as one “in favor of confining citizenship to white men” and opposed to Negro citizenship “in any and every form.” He then went on to claim that Lincoln believed the “Negro was born his equal” and is “endowed with equality by the Almighty.” Document 4.1 shows the document in the form in which it was presented to readers.

对于历史系学生泰德来说,斯蒂芬·A·道格拉斯这个名字听起来“非常熟悉……我不记得他有什么好话,但具体是什么事也想不起来。”泰德在阅读过程中的大部分评论都旨在建立文本的连贯性,即对文本表面含义的基本理解。只有当被问及这份文件揭示了林肯的哪些方面时,泰德才提出了一些可以称之为解读的观点:“嗯,这似乎表明林肯更……站在黑人一边。但我认为可能还有另一种观点。”

For Ted, the history major, the name Stephen A. Douglas sounded “really familiar…I don't remember too [many] good things about him, but nothing specific.” The majority of Ted's comments during this reading were aimed at establishing textual coherence, a basic understanding of the surface meanings of the text. Only when asked what the document disclosed about Lincoln did Ted venture anything that might be called an interpretation: “Well, this makes it seem like Lincoln was much more…on the side of the Negro. But I think that there is probably another view to that.”

另一方面,艾伦虽然对林肯的观点也缺乏深入了解,但她对道格拉斯演讲中“令人难以置信的种族主义言辞”感到震惊,不过她也指出,“这并非煽动性言论”,而是“客观事实,有据可查的信念——这显然是事实,人人都知道”。当被问及这份文件让她对林肯有了哪些了解时,她说它并没有告诉她什么。相反,她提到了阅读时脑海中浮现的一个画面:

Ellen, on the other hand, although also lacking detailed knowledge of Lincoln's views, was struck by the “incredibly racist language” of Douglas' speech, but noted that “it is not inflammatory” but “matter of fact, documented belief—this is obviously true, everyone knows it.” When asked what the document told her about Lincoln, she said that it told her little. Instead she referred to a mental image that came to her while reading:

我读这篇文章的时候并没有刻意去想林肯。我当时更多的是在阅读文字,想象着斯蒂芬·道格拉斯站在讲台上,向人群慷慨激昂地发表这番演讲。听众都是些什么人?当时的文化氛围如何?为什么这番话在1858年可以接受,而现在却不能说了?

When I was reading it I wasn't actively thinking of Lincoln. I was actively reading the words and thinking more of Stephen Douglas on the platform, orating and delivering this to a crowd. Who would be in the crowd listening and what the culture was at this time and why this was acceptable to say in 1858 but is now not acceptable to say.

这里有几点值得注意。首先,艾伦立即开始为这番言论构建社会背景——政治竞选集会、喧闹的人群,以及演讲者对听众感受的体谅。但她所做的第二件事则更为微妙——她意识到自己信念与这份文件中反映的观点之间的差异。通过强调“可接受性”问题,并认识到在她看来“极其种族主义”的言论在当时会被视为“不言而喻、有据可查的信念”,艾伦巧妙地将两个层面的背景交织在一起:一是社会场合的问题,二是“心态”(mentalité)的问题,即构成当时精神图景的普遍思维模式。她试图理解这样一个世界:这些观点并非出自暴徒或边缘分子之口,而是出自未来的参议员和选举他们的选民之口。在这种情况下,艾伦的语境化思维的特点是与过去相关的异质性的产生,而不是连续性的产生。

Several things are worthy of note here. First, Ellen immediately began to build a social context for this utterance—political hustings, roaring crowds, and the speaker's awareness of the sensibilities of his listeners. But the second thing she does is more subtle—she recognizes the discrepancy between her own beliefs and those reflected in this document. By calling attention to issues of “acceptability” and recognizing that what struck her as “incredibly racist” would have been considered “matter of fact, documented belief,” Ellen wove together two facets of context: issues of the social occasion and issues of mentalité, the sweeping modes of thought that formed the mental landscape of the day. She tried here to understand a world in which such views were expounded, not by thugs or fringe elements, but by future senators and the voters who elected them. It is the creation of foreignness in relation to the past, not the creation of continuity, that characterizes Ellen's contextualized thinking in this instance.

文件 4.1.斯蒂芬·A ·道格拉斯的演讲

Document 4.1. Speech by Stephen A. Douglas


1858年,亚伯拉罕·林肯与斯蒂芬·A·道格拉斯竞选美国参议员席位。两人进行了七场公开辩论,引起了全国的关注。尽管林肯最终落选,但他因其在奴隶制问题上的观点而广为人知。以下节选自道格拉斯在1858年8月21日于伊利诺伊州渥太华举行的首次辩论中对林肯的讲话

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The two engaged in a series of seven public debates, which attracted national attention. Although Lincoln lost the election, he became widely known for his views on slavery. The following is an excerpt from Douglas' address to Lincoln in their first debate at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858.

如果你渴望黑人获得公民权,如果你渴望允许他们进入本州与白人共同生活,如果你渴望他们拥有与你们平等的投票权,并赋予他们担任公职、担任陪审员和裁决你们权利的资格,那么就请支持林肯先生和支持黑人公民权的黑人共和党。然而,我本人反对任何形式的黑人公民权。我相信这个政府是由白人建立的,是为了白人及其后代的永远利益,我赞成将公民权限定于白人,即欧洲出生和血统的人,而不是赋予黑人、印第安人和其他劣等种族。

If you desire Negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the White man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to judge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the Negro. For one, I am opposed to Negro citizenship in any and every form. I believe this government was made…by White men, for the benefit of White men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to White men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon Negroes, Indians and other inferior races.

林肯先生效仿那些四处在学校和教堂地下室演讲的废奴主义演说家,朗读了《独立宣言》中“人人生而平等”的段落,然后质问:怎能剥夺黑人上帝和《独立宣言》赋予他们的平等权利?他和他们坚持认为,黑人的平等权利受到上帝律法的保障,并在《独立宣言》中得到明确阐述……我并不质疑林肯先生的良心信念,即黑人生来就与他平等,因而也是他的兄弟。但就我个人而言,我不认为黑人与我平等,我断然否认他是我的兄弟……林肯认为,黑人生来就与他和你们平等,全能的上帝赋予了他平等的权利,没有任何人间法律可以剥夺他这些权​​利……然而,我不相信全能的上帝曾打算让黑人与白人平等……数千年来,黑人一直是地球上的一个种族。在这漫长的岁月中,无论身处何地,无论纬度如何,无论气候如何,无论他们迁徙到哪里,无论他们被带到哪里,他们都处于劣势。他们属于一个劣等种族,也注定永远处于劣势地位。

Mr. Lincoln, following the example and lead of all the little abolition orators, who go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from the Declaration of Independence, that all men were created equal, and then asks how can you deprive a Negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of Independence award to him. He and they maintain that Negro equality is guaranteed by the laws of God, and that it is asserted in the Declaration of Independence…. I do not question Mr. Lincoln's conscientious belief that the Negro was made his equal, and hence his brother, but for my own part, I do not regard the Negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother…. [Lincoln] holds that the Negro was born his equal and yours, and that he was endowed with equality by the Almighty, and that no human law can deprive him of these rights…. Now, I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the Negro to be the equal of the White man…. For thousands of years the Negro has been a race upon the earth, and during all that time, in all latitudes and climates, wherever he has wandered or been taken, he has been inferior to the race which he has there met. He belongs to an inferior race, and must always occupy an inferior position.

资料来源:亚伯拉罕·林肯,《演讲与著作》第 1-2 卷(纽约,1989 年),第 504-505 页。

Source: Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, vols. 1–2 (New York, 1989), 504–5.

注:斜体字部分为介绍目的,并用于提供书目信息,因此被添加到文档开头

Note: Material in italics was added at the beginning of the document for introductory purposes and to provide bibliographic information.


文件4.2是林肯-道格拉斯辩论中最著名的文本之一,也是“林肯是白人至上主义者”学派的原始文本。通读全文,这份文件似乎比本章开头的节选更难归类。然而,我们无法回避林肯是否是种族主义者这个问题。事实上,提出这个问题——并基于证据给出答案——将我们推到了历史推理的核心。在这方面,值得引用唐纳德·费伦巴赫的话:

Document 4.2 is one of the most famous texts from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Ur-text of the “Lincoln as White Supremacist” school. Viewed in its entirety, this document appears less easy to classify than the shortened excerpt at the beginning of this chapter. Nonetheless, it is impossible to avoid asking whether Lincoln was a racist. In fact, to pose this question—and to formulate an answer based on evidence—thrusts us into the epicenter of historical reasoning. It is worth quoting Donald Fehrenbacher in this regard:

任何认真探究林肯是否是种族主义者的人,很快就会发现自己身处错综复杂的问题之中,并不得不面对历史研究中一些根本性的难题。其中一类问题涉及历史学家与过去的关系:他的任务是否仅仅是细致的重构,还是有更重要的目的需要实现?他的责任是否包括做出道德判断?如果包括,那么应该采用何种标准——是他所处时代的标准,还是所研究时期的标准?此外,试图从现存的言行记录中解读一个人的思想,尤其是一位政治家的思想,也会遇到诸多复杂情况。例如,他年轻时公开宣称的观点,成年后可能已被他默默抛弃;他对某个问题的看法,其重要性可能不及他信念的强度;他在特定场合的言论,很大程度上可能取决于当时的时代背景,包括听众的构成。 11

Anyone who sets out conscientiously to answer [whether Lincoln was a racist] will soon find himself deep in complexity and confronting some of the fundamental problems of historical investigation. In one category are various questions about the historian's relation to the past: Is his task properly one of careful reconstruction, or are there more important purposes to be served? Does his responsibility include rendering moral judgments? If so, using what standards—those of his own time or those of the period under study? Then there are all the complications encountered in any effort to read the mind of a man, especially a politician, from the surviving record of his words and actions. For instance, what he openly affirmed as a youth may have been silently discarded in maturity; what he believed on a certain subject may be less significant than the intensity of his belief; and what he said on a certain occasion may have been largely determined by the immediate historical context, including the composition of his audience.11

当泰德读到林肯给道格拉斯的回信时,他感到一种似曾相识的感觉。起初,他觉得这份文件以前见过,读到第六行时,这种感觉更加强烈:“是的,我以前读过。”林肯说“他支持他所属的种族”,这更加印证了泰德的看法:林肯并非教科书中描绘的“伟大的解放者”,而是一个“想要重新统一各州,而不仅仅是废除奴隶制”的人。“是啊,你看,这反而让林肯显得更加偏执,而不是那么无私。”读完这份文件,泰德对林肯的先前印象得到了证实。

As Ted read Lincoln's reply to Douglas, he felt a certain familiarity. Initially he sensed that he had seen the document before, and by the sixth line, this feeling had grown stronger: “Yes, I have read this before.” Lincoln's statement that “he was in favor of the race to which he belonged” strengthened Ted's view that Lincoln was not the “Great Emancipator” of textbooks, but someone who wanted “to reunite the states, not just get rid of slavery” “Yeah, see, now this makes Lincoln seem more bigoted and not so altruistic.” By the end of the document, Ted's prior understanding of Lincoln was confirmed:

林肯并非出于利他主义的目的,为黑人的利益而努力……他确实说过,在某种程度上,他们应该得到平等的待遇,但他仍然没有给予他们平等——他没有给予他们……人格上的平等。

Lincoln was not so much in the interest—working in the interest of the black man, for altruistic sense…he does say that they deserve equal treatment, in a way, but still he's not giving them equal—he's not giving them…equality in personhood.

在泰德看来,林肯的这些话显得格外独立。它们反映了林肯的信念,没有受到他表达这些信念的场合或他试图达成的社会目的的影响。

For Ted, Lincoln's words stand starkly alone. They mirror Lincoln's beliefs, unfiltered by the occasion on which those beliefs were expressed or the social ends Lincoln tried to achieve in expressing them.

相比之下,艾伦将超过三分之一的发言(306个字中的107个字)用于构建社会背景。林肯在文件第二部分中关于黑人平等的论述引发了表4.1中的评论,该表列出了泰德的评论以供比较。

Ellen, in contrast, devoted over one-third of her comments (107 words out of 306 spoken) to creating a social context. Lincoln's statement of the Negro's equality in the second part of the document prompted the comment that appears in Table 4.1, where Ted's comments are presented for comparison.

在艾伦看来,这份文件揭示了林肯的哪些信息?似乎很少。当被问及这份文件如何阐明林肯的观点时,她重申了之前的解读:“我看待林肯的方式,就像看待一个试图当选的政客一样——他们为了当选会不择手段,什么话都说得出口,什么事都做。所以你不能相信他们。”艾伦的解读与泰德截然不同。泰德认为林肯的回应证明了他的偏见。而艾伦则认为,文件中没有提及偏见,也没有提及这份文件对林肯的评价,除了他像其他政客一样,言行不一。相反,这份文件指向了一个她非常熟悉的社会背景——候选人为了赢得选票,会不择手段。

What does this document disclose about Lincoln in Ellen's view? Very little, it seems. When asked how this document illuminated Lincoln's views, she affirmed her earlier reading: “I view [Lincoln] in the context of how I view a politician trying to get elected—that they'll say anything, do anything to get elected. And that you can't trust them.” Ellen's reading contrasts sharply with Ted's. For Ted, Lincoln's response provided evidence of bigotry. For Ellen, on the other hand, there is no mention of bigotry, no mention of what the document says about Lincoln other than the fact that, like other politicians, he spoke out of both sides of his mouth. Instead, the document points to a social context she knows well—one in which candidates say what is needed to earn votes.


文件 4.2.林肯对道格拉斯的答复

Document 4.2. Lincoln's reply to Douglas

摘自亚伯拉罕·林肯于 1858 年 8 月 21 日在伊利诺伊州渥太华对斯蒂芬·A·道格拉斯的回信

From Abraham Lincoln's reply to Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858.

在此我要声明……我无意直接或间接干预各州现有的奴隶制。我认为我没有合法权利这样做,也无意这样做。我无意在白人和黑人之间推行政治和社会平等。两者之间存在生理差异,依我之见,这种差异很可能永远阻碍他们完全平等地生活在一起。既然这种差异不可避免,那么我和道格拉斯法官一样,都赞成我所属的种族拥有优越的地位。我从未说过相反的话,但我认为,尽管如此,没有任何理由可以剥夺黑人享有《独立宣言》中所列举的所有自然权利,即生命权、自由权和追求幸福的权利。我认为,他与白人一样,理应享有这些权利。我同意道格拉斯法官的观点,黑人在许多方面都不如我——肤色肯定不如我,道德或智力方面或许也不如我。但在享用自己劳动所得的权利上,他与我平等,与道格拉斯法官平等,与所有活着的人平等。

I will say here…that I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the White man. I agree with Judge Douglas [that the Negro] is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread…which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

资料来源:亚伯拉罕·林肯,《演讲与著作》第 1-2 卷(纽约,1989 年),第 512 页。

Source: Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, vols. 1–2 (New York, 1989), 512.


图像

艾伦将林肯描绘成一个虚伪的政客,一心只想赢得选举,这种观点符合一种由来已久的解读传统。理查德·霍夫施塔特在其著作《美国政治传统》中对林肯进行了人物刻画,他认为林肯在早期文献中的言论既迎合了废奴主义者,也迎合了“仇视黑人者”。 12他评论了林肯1858年7月10日在芝加哥发表的演讲(“让我们抛弃所有关于这个人与另一个人、这个种族与那个种族的争论……团结起来,成为一个民族”),并将其与林肯在……的演讲进行了比较。1858年9月18日,霍夫施塔特在查尔斯顿发表讲话(“我和其他人一样,都赞成将优越地位赋予白种人”),他评论说:

Ellen's framing of Lincoln as a disingenuous politician seeking to get elected falls within a well-established interpretative tradition. Richard Hofstadter, who profiled Lincoln in his American Political Tradition, characterized Lincoln's words in the earlier document as appealing at once to abolitionists and “Negrophobes.”12 Remarking on a speech Lincoln gave in Chicago on July 10, 1858 (“Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race…and unite as one people”) and comparing it with a speech Lincoln gave in Charleston on September 18, 1858 (“I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race”), Hofstadter remarked that it was

很难断定真正的林肯究竟是芝加哥演讲的那位,还是查尔斯顿演讲的那位。或许他当时对自己的每一句话都深信不疑;或许他的内心也早已分裂。无论如何,这一切很容易看出是一位职业政客为了拉选票而采取的手段。13

not easy to decide whether the true Lincoln is the one who spoke in Chicago or the one who spoke in Charleston. Possibly the man devoutly believed each of the utterances at the time he delivered it; possibly his mind too was a house divided against itself. In any case it is easy to see in all this the behavior of a professional politician looking for votes.13

艾伦和霍夫施塔特都以政治竞选的需要为由,解释了林肯言论中看似矛盾之处。因为林肯需要争取两派选民的支持,所以他不得不言辞前后矛盾。但“分裂的林肯”这种解读并非理解这些文献的唯一途径。

Both Ellen and Hofstadter resolved apparent contradictions in Lincoln's words by appealing to the exigencies of a political campaign. Because Lincoln needed to woo voters from both camps, he needed to talk out of both sides of his mouth. But the “divided Lincoln” interpretation is not the only way to understand these documents.

林肯在文献4.2中的言论使我们陷入了语境化思考的困境。如果我们假定种族关系本质上是连续的,就会发现林肯的言论存在矛盾之处。这些矛盾反过来又促使我们去构建语境,以解释为什么林肯会对不同的人说出不同的话。但如果我们一开始就相信清晰的语言和纯粹的逻辑本身就是历史的一部分,那么面对这些明显的矛盾,我们就能做出不同的回应。这些矛盾就成了我们探索自身与过去断裂的机会——这是试图跨越时空鸿沟的必然结果。

Lincoln's statements in Document 4.2 thrust us into the dilemma of contextualized thinking. If we presume an essential continuity in race relations, we see inconsistencies in Lincoln's words. These inconsistencies in turn lead us to create a context to explain why, for instance, Lincoln would say different things to different people. But if we begin with the belief that clear language and pure logic are themselves historical, then we are open to different responses in the face of apparent inconsistencies. Inconsistencies become opportunities for exploring our discontinuity with the past, the inevitable consequence of trying to bridge spatial and temporal gaps across the ages.

回想一下,道格拉斯和林肯之间的争论焦点在于《独立宣言》中隐含的一个逻辑推理。如果正如《宣言》所言,“人人生而平等”,而正如道格拉斯所言,“黑人与我不平等”,那么按照道格拉斯的定义,黑人就不能被视为人。如果林肯所探讨的问题正是如此,那么他的观点是明确无误的。

Recall that what is at issue between Douglas and Lincoln is an implied syllogism flowing from the Declaration of Independence. If, as the Declaration stated, “all men are created equal” and if, as Douglas stated, “the Negro is not my equal” then, by Douglas' definition, the Negro is not to be considered a man. If this was the question Lincoln addressed, his views were unequivocal.

理查德·韦弗在其著作《修辞伦理学》中阐述了林肯如何运用“定义论证”策略,即通过逐一剔除无关的次要问题,揭示问题的本质。 14尽管其他政治家从历史、比较政治、圣经或当时的形势等角度审视奴隶制问题,但林肯的策略是从基本原则出发进行论证。他的《皮奥里亚演讲》为我们深入了解这种论证风格提供了重要线索。在这次演讲中,林肯告诉听众,他将聚焦于奴隶制问题的“本质”。他以“人的属”这一问题开篇,而这恰恰是文献4.1和4.2中讨论的核心问题:

In his Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver demonstrated how Lincoln “argued by definition” a strategy that attacked a problem by whittling away at the side issues to reveal its unambiguous inner essence.14 Although other statesmen examined slavery from the perspective of history, comparative politics, the Bible, or the exigencies of the moment, Lincoln's tack was to argue from first principles. His “Speech at Peoria” provides insight into this style of argument. In this case, Lincoln told his audience that he would focus on the “naked merits” of the issue of slavery. He began his speech with the question of the genus of man, precisely the issue at the heart of the exchange in Documents 4.1 and 4.2:

有人说,对南方人给予平等的正义,就要求我们同意将奴隶制扩展到新的国家。也就是说,既然你们不反对我把我的猪带到内布拉斯加州,那么我也就不能反对你们带走你们的奴隶。我承认,如果猪和黑人之间没有区别,这完全合乎逻辑。但是,既然你们这样要求我否认黑人的人性,我想问问你们南方人自己是否也曾愿意这样做?15

Equal justice to the South, it is said, requires us to consent to the extending of slavery to new countries. That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to your taking your slave. Now, I admit that this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and Negroes. But while you thus require me to deny the humanity of the Negro, I wish to ask whether you of the South yourselves have ever been willing to do as much?15

林肯问道,如果奴隶只是动产,就像猪或牛一样,那么为什么奴隶贩子和猪贩子受到的待遇不一样呢?

If the slave was mere chattel, like a hog or cow, then why, asked Lincoln, was the seller of slaves treated differently from the seller of hogs?

你对他极其鄙夷。你不把他当朋友,甚至不把他当诚实的人。你的孩子不能和他的孩子玩;他们可以和那些小黑孩们自由嬉戏,但不能和“奴隶贩子”的孩子玩。如果你不得不和他打交道,你会尽量避免和他有任何身体接触。你通常会和遇到的其他人握手;但对于奴隶贩子,你会刻意回避这种礼节——本能地避开这种阴险的接触。即使他发了财,退出了奴隶贩子的生意,你仍然会记得他,仍然会禁止和他以及他的家人来往。这是为什么呢?你对待那些贩卖玉米、棉花或烟草的人却不是这样吗?16

You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little Negroes, but not with the “slave dealer's” children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with men you meet; but with the slave dealer you avoid the ceremony—instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now why is this? You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cotton, or tobacco?16

林肯用其他例子进一步阐述了他的观点。例如,南方人应该如何看待当时居住在美国的433,643名自由黑人?此外,如果这些黑人的主人不认为“可怜的黑人对自己拥有某种天然的权利”,那么他们的自由又是如何以主人巨大的经济损失换来的呢?值得引用韦弗的总结:

Lincoln hammered at his point with other examples. How, for instance, should Southerners label the 433,643 free blacks living in the United States at that time? Moreover, how did their freedom come about, at great financial sacrifice to their owners, if these same owners did not feel that the “poor Negro has some sense of natural right to himself”? It is worth quoting Weaver's summary:

林肯始终坚持人类只有一个属的立场;在他早期的律师生涯中,他就明白,与其试图通过一系列论点来构建一个令人印象深刻的论证,不如基于一个无可辩驳的论点来展开论证。多年来,他始终顽固地坚持这一属的概念,并由此得出这样的命题:适用于整个家族的基本真理也适用于家族的各个分支。因此,既然《独立宣言》已经禁止了对人的奴役,那么原则上也禁止了对黑人的奴役。 17

Lincoln could never be dislodged from his position that there is one genus of human beings; and early in his career as lawyer he had learned that it is better to base an argument upon one incontrovertible point than to try to make an impressive case through a whole array of points. Through the years he clung tenaciously to this concept of genus, from which he could draw the proposition that what is fundamentally true of the family will be true also of the branches of the family. Therefore since the Declaration of Independence had interdicted slavery for man, slavery was interdicted for the Negro in principle.17

如果我们仔细审视林肯在文献4.2中的回应,就会发现一些容易被其充满争议的措辞所掩盖的细节。请注意,林肯唯一愿意明确承认道格拉斯观点的,是“两个种族之间存在生理差异”,但从那以后,林肯的措辞就变得含糊其辞了。林肯说,道德或智力方面或许存在差异。大多数当时的读者忽略了这个或许”,但即便提出两个种族在道德和智力上可能相等,也必须将其置于十九世纪中期种族主义的背景下看待斯坦福大学历史学家乔治·弗雷德里克森认为,林肯在此追随了他的共和党导师亨利·克莱的脚步。克莱主张逐步解放黑人,并在其政治生涯早期宣称,黑人“和我们一样,是理性的人,能够感受、反思,并判断作为人类一部分,他们自然拥有什么”。 18

If we look carefully at Lincoln's response in Document 4.2, we see aspects that are easily overshadowed by its charged language. Notice that the only point Lincoln was willing to concede unequivocally to Douglas is a “physical difference between the two races” but from then on Lincoln equivocated. There is only “perhaps” a difference in moral or intellectual endowment, Lincoln said. This “perhaps” goes unnoticed by most contemporary readers, but even to raise the possibility that the two races were morally and intellectually equivalent must be viewed against the backdrop of mid-nineteenth-century racism. The Stanford historian George Fredrickson has argued that here Lincoln followed in the footsteps of his Republican mentor, Henry Clay, who advocated gradual emancipation and early in his career declared that blacks “are rational beings, like ourselves, capable of feeling, of reflection, and of judging of what naturally belongs to them as a portion of the human race.”18

弗雷德里克森对克莱的论述将时代精神与林肯的个人传记交织在一起。道德权利和法律权利之间看似细微的差别,在林肯以及他许多同时代人的心中却意义重大。由于我们无法想象一个将这种区分视为“进步”的世界,我们往往会认为林肯的言论自相矛盾,甚至更糟——虚伪自私。

Fredrickson's appeal to Clay interweaves aspects of the Zeitgeist with Lincoln's personal biography. What appears as a hairsplitting distinction between moral and legal rights was a meaningful difference in Lincoln's mind and in the minds of many of his contemporaries. Because we cannot fathom a world in which such a distinction would be viewed as “progressive” we tend to view Lincoln's statements as contradictory and inconsistent, or worse—as hypocritical and self-serving.

对泰德而言,林肯的话语揭示了林肯的内心世界,而他从中看到的林肯形象却是一个偏执狂。对艾伦而言,林肯的话语更多地反映了当时的社会状况,而非林肯本人的真实面目。韦弗、弗雷德里克森等人指出,“赤裸裸的真相”远比我们想象的更加隐晦。

For Ted, Lincoln's words cast light on Lincoln's soul, and the image perceived was that of a bigot. For Ellen, Lincoln's words disclosed more about the social situation than the naked truth about the man in that situation. What Weaver, Fredrickson, and others suggest is that the “naked truth” is more veiled than we think.

第三份文件出自林肯人生中的不同时期,属于另一种文献类型。与公开回应道格拉斯的信件不同,文件4.3是林肯写给肯塔基州玛丽·斯皮德的一封私人信件,玛丽是林肯的挚友约书亚·斯皮德的妻子。在信中,林肯描述了他乘坐密西西比河轮船的旅程,船上载着一群奴隶被沿河贩卖。

The third document was drawn from a different time in Lincoln's life and exemplifies a different genre of documentary evidence. Unlike the public response to Douglas, Document 4.3 was a private letter to Mary Speed of Kentucky, the wife of Joshua Speed, a close friend. In this letter, Lincoln described a journey on a Mississippi riverboat on which a group of slaves were literally being sold down the river.

文件 4.3.致玛丽·斯皮德的信

Document 4.3. Letter to Mary Speed


亚伯拉罕·林肯于 1841 年 9 月 27 日写信给他的私人朋友玛丽·斯皮德

Abraham Lincoln, writing to Mary Speed, a personal friend, September 27, 1841.

顺便一提,船上有一个很好的例子,可以用来思考境遇对人类幸福的影响。一位绅士在肯塔基州的不同地方买了十二个黑人,准备把他们带到南方的一个农场。他们六六一组地被铁链锁在一起。每个人的左手腕上都套着一个小铁环,就像鱼线一样,把他们串成一串。在这种情况下,他们即将永远离开童年的家园、朋友、父母、兄弟姐妹,许多人甚至还要离开妻子和孩子,从此沦为奴隶……然而,在所有这些令人痛苦的境遇中……他们却是船上最快乐、最开朗的人。其中一个黑人,因为对妻子过于溺爱而被卖掉,他几乎不停地拉着小提琴;其他人则每天都跳舞、唱歌、讲笑话、玩各种纸牌游戏。“上帝使人类最糟糕的境遇也能忍受……”这句话真是至理名言。

By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve Negroes in different parts of Kentucky and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each so that the Negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery…yet amid all these distressing circumstances…they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offense for which he had been sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually; and the others danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that “God renders the worst of human conditions tolerable…”

资料来源:亚伯拉罕·林肯,《演讲与著作》第 1-2 卷(纽约,1989 年),第 74 页。

Source: Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, vols. 1–2 (New York, 1989), 74.


这份文件有几个方面使其具有争议性。首先,历史学家在判断文件的可信度时通常会考虑其文体,而且在缺乏其他信息的情况下,他们往往认为私人信件比公开声明更具说服力。 19 其次,这份文件的内容乍一看呈现出一种令人费解的对比。面对奴隶们被锁链紧紧捆绑在狭小空间里的景象,林肯感到有必要评论的不是人类的苦难,而是人类的幸福。

Several aspects of this document make it provocative. First, historians typically consider the genre of a document when making judgments of probity, and, in the absence of other information, they tend to regard personal correspondence as more probative than public pronouncements.19 Second, the substance of this document presents, at first glance, a perplexing contrast. Faced with the scene of slaves chained to each other in close quarters, Lincoln felt compelled to remark, not on human misery, but on human happiness.

泰德脑海中似乎形成某种解读的第一个点(见表4.2)是林肯描述那位“对妻子过分溺爱”的奴隶时。当被问及他对林肯的印象是否有所改变时,泰德回答说:

The first point at which an interpretation seemed to form in Ted's mind (see Table 4.2) was when Lincoln described the slave who had an “over-fondness for his wife.” When Ted was asked if his image of Lincoln had changed or stayed the same, he replied:

嗯,我还是不太确定。这可能需要我再读一遍,而且,我真的很想了解更多。他提出这个想法的真正目的是什么?除了“上帝”之外,他的最终结论是什么?“使最糟糕的人类境况也能忍受”?他似乎在说,人们能在最糟糕的条件下做到最好,这有点令人遗憾……这让他显得很关心他人。我相信他的确如此。然而,另一方面,就像我说的,把黑人看作是无忧无虑的人,那种形象……我不知道。这让我感到冒犯。所以,我想我不喜欢读这样的文章。

Well, I'm still kind of not sure. It's probably [a document] that I would have to read again, and really, I'd like to know more about this. Where was he really going with this idea? What was his total summation, rather than “God renders the worst of human conditions tolerable”? He seems to be saying that it is kind of unfortunate that people, that [they] could make the best of worst conditions…. So it gives him a sense of being caring. Which I do believe that he was. Yet, on the other hand, like I said, that the little, seeing Blacks as just happy-go-lucky people, that kind of image. I don't know. It's offensive to me. So, I don't like to read it, I guess.

这段评论有几个方面值得注意。首先,泰德有足够的自知之明,他意识到这份文件让他感到困惑,为了更好地理解,他或许应该再读一遍。其次,这段评论进一步阐述了泰德之前对林肯的刻板印象——一个偏执狂,尽管关于林肯“富有爱心”的评论暗示着他对这位第十六任总统仍抱有一些“守护神”式的看法。最后,泰德意识到自己对这段文字的情感反应,这些反应源于他认为带有根深蒂固偏见的描述。

Several aspects of this comment deserve note. First, Ted was sufficiently self-aware to know that the document leaves him uncertain, and that to understand it better he should probably read it again. Second, there is an elaboration of Ted's earlier image of Lincoln as bigot, though the comment about Lincoln “being caring” hints at some vestige of the “patron saint” view of the sixteenth president. Finally, Ted displayed an awareness of his emotional reactions to the text, reactions to images that he perceived as deeply bigoted.

表 4.2

艾伦的解读与此惊人地相似(见表4.3)这封信令人困惑:林肯怎么会如此冷酷无情,将人类的苦难误认为快乐?但林肯真的像他字里行间所暗示的那样冷酷无情吗?哪些缺失的背景信息可能会让我们对斯皮德的信有不同的理解?

Ellen's reading was remarkably similar (see Table 4.3). The letter generated perplexity: How can Lincoln be so callous as to mistake human misery for cheerfulness? But is Lincoln really as callous as his words suggest? What missing pieces of context might lead us to view the Speed letter differently?

林肯对那些被迫离开家园和亲人的人们的苦难视而不见吗?还有什么比他对玛丽·斯皮德说的这些话更能证明他对奴隶的痛苦麻木不仁呢?乔治·弗雷德里克森在写下这些话时,想到了林肯在写给斯皮德的信中所说的话在现代人听来会是怎样的感受:

Was Lincoln blind to the suffering of people wrenched from their homes and families? What better evidence could there be for a gross insensitivity to the pain of slaves than these words to Mary Speed? George Fredrickson had in mind how Lincoln's words in the Speed letter would strike the modern ear when he wrote:

这种哲学思辨很难说是反奴隶制热情的体现,反而很容易被斥为自满、麻木或缺乏想象力的表现。然而,它却基于一个在19世纪40年代日益罕见的假设:黑人对自身处境的反应可以用共同的人性来理解,而不是由特殊的种族特征造成的。20

Such philosophizing was hardly indicative of antislavery zeal, and it can easily be condemned as a manifestation of complacency, insensitivity, or lack of imagination. But it was nevertheless based on the assumption, increasingly rare in the 1840s, that blacks responded to conditions in a way that could be understood in terms of a common humanity and not as the result of peculiar racial characteristics.20

很难想象一个奴隶的人格地位受到质疑的世界,但这恰恰是亚伯拉罕·林肯出生的世界。试图重构一个我们无法完全了解的世界,这本身就是一件难事。这或许就是对过去进行语境化解读和时代错置解读之间的区别。

It is difficult to imagine a world in which the human status of slaves was in question, but that is precisely the world into which Abraham Lincoln was born. Trying to reconstruct a world we cannot completely know may be the difference between a contextualized and an anachronistic reading of the past.

图像

泰德对文件4.4(林肯呈递给他的三份文件中的最后一份)着墨不多。 21他表示自己对建立自由奴隶殖民地的计划已有所了解,阅读这份文件并没有对他关于林肯的看法产生任何影响。而艾伦则利用这份文件来丰富她对林肯的印象。她首先关注的是时间因素,指出这篇演说是在内战中期发表的。随着阅读的深入,她脑海中逐渐形成了林肯的另一个形象:

Ted had relatively little to say about Document 4.4, the last of three documents by Lincoln presented to him.21 He noted that he was broadly familiar with plans for colonies of freed slaves and that reading this document did little to influence his views about Lincoln one way or the other. Ellen, on the other hand, used it to flesh out her image of Lincoln. She began with its temporal aspects, noting that the address was delivered in the middle of the Civil War. As she read it, a different image of Lincoln formed in her mind:

林肯正在认真地处理一个在当时看来似乎合情合理的问题。但我感觉他正在努力解决一个根本没有完美解决方案的问题。这已经是目前最好的办法了。所以我把他看作是一个问题解决者……而不是那种试图给出含糊其辞的油滑政客。他是一位首席执行官或其他类型的……决策者试图处理某个问题或棘手的问题。他在第一篇文章[Doc. 4.2]中形象非常单一,有点像个油滑的政客。但在写给玛丽·斯皮德的信中,他展现了另一面,有人情味。而现在,他的形象又开始丰满起来,我感觉他更像是一位首席执行官,试图解决问题,试图平衡战争,未雨绸缪,思考战后该如何应对,并想出办法——这一切都发生在《解放奴隶宣言》颁布之前。是在《解放奴隶宣言》颁布之前吗?是的,是在之前。所以,我的意思是,他可能已经有了这个想法,他一直在思考,我们该如何处理如此庞大的奴隶群体?也许在1862年,殖民确实是一个可行的选择。这让我想起了英国对澳大利亚的做法。把所有不受欢迎的人都运到澳大利亚。

[Lincoln] is conscientiously trying to deal with a problem that is something that apparently made sense in that time frame. And I get the feeling that he is wrestling with something that doesn't really have a good solution. This is the best you can have for now. So I kind of see him as problem-solver…not the slimy politician trying to give [unclear]. [He is a] CEO or some type of decision-maker trying to deal with a problem or acute problem. He was real one-dimensional in the first article [Doc. 4.2], kind of a slimy politician. Then he has another side with the letter to Mary Speed, kind of human. And now this is again another, it's beginning to fill out, but now I see him more as the chief executive and trying to deal with problems, trying to balance a war, thinking ahead, what are we going to do after the war and sort of coming up with—and this is prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Is this prior to the Emancipation Proclamation? Yes, this is prior. So, I mean he may have had this idea in mind, so he's thinking forward, and how are we going to deal with this huge number of slaves? Maybe colonizing is certainly a viable option in 1862. It kind of reminds me of what the British did with Australia. Ship all the undesirables down to Australia.

艾伦在此提供了丰富的互文性解读。她引用了前三份文件中的两份,并以这些早期文件为背景,构建了她对文件4.4的理解。在她脑海中浮现出一个多面人物的形象:有时是“油滑的政客”,有时是充满爱心的人,而在这份文件中,他则是一位从事战略规划的首席执行官。她似乎意识到,这样的计划虽然在今天看来匪夷所思,但在十九世纪后半叶却更有意义。她将林肯的计划比作澳大利亚,意在寻找能够进一步阐释其背景的相似之处。为了理解林肯,艾伦将时代精神的元素与内战的年表相结合,并以此为基础,开始构建林肯生平的传记背景。

Ellen provided a richly intertextual reading here. She made reference to two of the three previous documents, and her understanding of Document 4.4 was formed with these earlier documents as backdrop. What emerged in her mind was an image of a multifaceted human being, a “slimy politician” in one instance, a caring person in another, and in this document a CEO engaged in strategic planning. There seems to be a recognition that such a plan, although outlandish today, made more sense in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The analogy to Australia represented a search for parallels that would further contextualize Lincoln's plan. To understand Lincoln, Ellen combined elements of the Zeitgeist with a chronology of the Civil War, and in so doing began to form the basis for a biographical context of Lincoln's life.

文件 4.4.关于殖民化的讲话

Document 4.4. Address on Colonization


殖民化获释黑人的想法早在十九世纪初就已提出。许多反对奴隶制的白人积极倡导殖民化,他们认为只有将黑人迁徙到其他地方,才能实现真正的自由和平等。亚伯拉罕·林肯长期以来都支持这一想法,1862年,国会拨款资助一项殖民化计划。以下摘自林肯于1862年8月14日在白宫向一群自由黑人发表的《关于殖民化的演说》

Colonization of freed blacks was an idea proposed early in the nineteenth century. Many whites who opposed slavery actively advocated colonization, maintaining that true freedom and equality could be realized only by relocating the black population. Abraham Lincoln had long favored the idea, and, in 1862, a sum of money was appropriated by Congress to aid in a colonization program. The following is from Lincoln's “Address on Colonization” delivered to a group of free black men at the White House on August 14, 1862.

你们种族为何要被殖民?又该在哪里殖民?如果我们一开始就选择那些不自由、思想被奴役蒙蔽的人,那么我们一开始的条件就非常差。如果聪明的有色人种能够参与其中,或许就能取得更大的成就。至关重要的是,我们一开始就必须选择那些能够像白人一样思考的人,而不是那些长期遭受压迫的人……我考虑建立殖民地的地方是中美洲……那里的土地非常适合任何民族,拥有丰富的自然资源和优势,尤其气候与你们的故乡相似,因此非常适合你们的体质。

Why…should the people of your race be colonized, and where? If we deal with those who are not free at the beginning, and whose intellects are clouded by slavery, we have very poor materials to start with. If intelligent colored men…would move in this matter, much might be accomplished. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as White men, and not those who have been systematically oppressed…. The place I am thinking about having for a colony is in Central America…. The country is a very excellent one for any people, and with great natural resources and advantages, and especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land—thus being suited to your physical condition.

资料来源:亚伯拉罕·林肯,《演讲与著作》第 1-2 卷(纽约,1989 年),第 368 页。

Source: Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, vols. 1–2 (New York, 1989), 368.


约翰·贝尔·罗宾逊在其演讲(文献4.5)中,以宗教论证来支持奴隶制:“上帝创造他们是为了让他们成为有用的奴隶,并要求我们这样使用他们。如果我们背信弃义,将他们抛弃,让他们自生自灭,我们就把他们重新变成了野蛮人。”这些话语掷地有声,在我们看来却荒谬至极。但我们应该意识到,以宗教为由为奴隶制辩护,可以追溯到英国与非洲接触之初。 22读着约翰·贝尔·罗宾逊的言论,泰德对那些与他自身种族观念相悖的观点感到愤怒。当罗宾逊将奴隶制与松树传教团联系起来时,他脱口而出:“我的脑子一片混乱,啊!我无法用语言来形容。”当罗宾逊声称如果将黑奴送回非洲,他们“不到五十年就会退回到异教和野蛮状态”时,泰德镇定下来回应道:“他是不是认为他们是野蛮人?我的意思是,这是在否定他们原本的生活方式和文化,我认为这不应该这样做。”当被问及阅读罗宾逊的文字是否对林肯的观点有所启发时(泰德在前三份文件中重新接触到了林肯的观点),泰德回答说:“没有,因为我没有看到罗宾逊在文中提到林肯,而且,我重新阅读了作者的名字,这个名字听起来很陌生,我根本无法将它与林肯联系起来。”

John Bell Robinson begins his address (Document 4.5) by advancing a religious argument for slavery: “God himself has made them for usefulness as slaves and requires us to employ them as such and if we betray our trust and throw them off on their own resources, we reconvert them into barbarians.” These are powerful words that strike us as absurd, but we should recognize that a religious justification for slavery goes back to the inception of English contact with Africa.22 Reading John Bell Robinson, Ted bristled at ideas foreign to his own views on race. When Robinson linked slavery to the pine mission, he blurted: “My mind is going, Argh! I can't describe it in words.” When Robinson stated that if Negro slaves were sent back to Africa, they would fall back into “heathenism and barbarism in less than fifty years,” Ted composed himself and responded: “Is that what he thinks they were—barbarians—I mean it's putting down their own natural life style and culture as they were, which I don't think should be done.” And when he was asked if reading Robinson's words shed any light on Lincoln's views, with which he had been reacquainted in the previous three documents, Ted responded: “No, because it's, I don't see Lincoln being addressed in this or, rereading his name who wrote it, that name doesn't sound familiar and I can't connect it to Lincoln at all.”

我们应该如何解读泰德的解读?当然,从某种程度上来说,泰德是对的。约翰·贝尔·罗宾逊贬低了他所认识的非洲人的“自然生活方式”,他的言辞中充满了对与他不同的人的偏见和不尊重。但从另一个层面来看,泰德的评论也让我们得以窥见许多大学生所持有的对过去的一种看法,这种看法被大卫·洛文塔尔描述为一种“永恒的过去”,在这种过去中,我们用来理解当下的概念(“种族主义”、“偏见”、“宽容”、“多元文化理解”)被视为静态的范畴,在时间和空间中保持不变。 23在这样的过去中,约翰·贝尔·罗宾逊本应有不同的想法。但公平地说,罗宾逊先生也不应该出生在一个像温斯罗普·乔丹和乔治·弗雷德里克森所提醒我们的那样,将白人欧洲男性奉为评判人类标准的时代。

How should we construe Ted's reading? On one level, of course, Ted is right. John Bell Robinson is “putting down the natural life style” of the Africans he knew, and his words smack of intolerance and disrespect for people unlike himself. But on another level, Ted's comments provide a glimpse into a view of the past shared by many college students, a view David Lowenthal characterized as a “timeless past” in which the constructs we use to make sense of our present (“racism” “bigotry” “tolerance” “multicultural understandings”) stand as static categories unchanged across time and space.23 In such a past, John Bell Robinson should have thought differently. But to be fair to Mr. Robinson, he also should not have been born into a world that, as Winthrop Jordan and George Fredrickson remind us, exalted the white European male as the standard by which humanity was to be judged.


文件 4.5.奴隶制的益处

Document 4.5. Benefits of Slavery


摘自《奴隶制与反奴隶制图片集:从道德、社会和政治角度考虑黑人奴隶制的优势和黑人自由的益处》,作者约翰·贝尔·罗宾逊,一位支持奴隶制的白人发言人,宾夕法尼亚州,1863 年,第42 页

From Pictures of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: Advantages of Negro Slavery and the Benefits of Negro Freedom Morally, Socially, and Politically Considered by John Bell Robinson, a White pro-slavery spokesperson, Pennsylvania, 1863, p. 42.

上帝创造他们是为了让他们成为有用的奴隶,也要求我们这样使用他们。如果我们背信弃义,任由他们自生自灭,我们就把他们重新变成野蛮人。我们的天父创造我们是为了统治,而让黑人服侍。如果我们……为了人类的福祉和祂自身的荣耀而背弃祂神圣的安排,篡改祂的律法,我们必将覆灭,永远蒙受耻辱,甚至沦为其他文明国家的臣民……将所有黑人安置在他们原先的土地上几乎是不可能的,因此永远无法实现,这片绿色的地球上也没有其他地方适合他们。把他们送到其他任何地方都是极其残忍和野蛮的行为。即使能把他们全部安置在非洲海岸,不到五十年,他们就会重新回到异教和野蛮的状态。

God himself has made them for usefulness as slaves, and requires us to employ them as such, and if we betray our trust, and throw them off on their own resources, we reconvert them into barbarians. Our Heavenly Father has made us to rule, and the Negroes to serve, and if we…set aside his holy arrangements for the good of mankind and his own glory, and tamper with his laws, we shall be overthrown and eternally degraded, and perhaps made subjects of some other civilized nation…. Colonization in their native land of all the Negroes would be so nearly impracticable, that it will never be done, and no other spot on this green earth will do for them. It would be the height of cruelty and barbarism to send them anywhere else. If they could all be colonized on the coast of Africa, they would fall back into heathenism and barbarism in less than fifty years.


我们也从泰德的言论中看出,语境化的思考方式并非如此泰德说罗宾逊没有提及林肯,这没错。但从另一个层面来看,泰德错了,因为罗宾逊让我们对林肯时代的思想图景有了更深入的了解。罗宾逊是这一图景一端的标志,正如威廉·劳埃德·加里森(见文献4.6)是另一端的标志一样。在一个由各种不同层次的思想构成的世界里,林肯的思想又呈现出怎样的层次?他在思想谱系中的位置又在哪里?

We also see what contextualized thinking does not look like when Ted tells us that Robinson teaches him nothing about Lincoln. Ted is right in saying that Robinson does not mention Lincoln. But on another level, Ted is wrong, for Robinson tells us a great deal about the mental landscape that prevailed in Lincoln's day. Robinson is a marker at one end of that landscape, just as William Lloyd Garrison (see Document 4.6) is a marker at the other end. In a universe of ideas of different textures, what is the texture of Lincoln's ideas? Where can he be located on the spectrum of ideas?

这个问题也让艾伦感到困惑。罗宾逊的文件并没有让艾伦对林肯发表任何自发的评论。她完全被罗宾逊充满煽动性的言辞所困扰,并将此与希特勒的“最终解决方案”相提并论。罗宾逊声称被遣返的奴隶会“重新堕入异教和野蛮状态”,这番话引发了艾伦如下的反应:

This question provided a stumbling block for Ellen as well. Robinson's document elicited from Ellen no spontaneous comments about Lincoln. She was consumed by Robinson's charged words, drawing comparisons with Adolf Hitler's “Final Solution.” Robinson's statement that repatriated slaves would “fall back into heathenism and barbarism” sparked this response:

我简直不敢相信有人会这么想。真的不敢相信!这太糟糕了。但这真的不会影响我对林肯的看法。我一直都很关注他这个人。我简直气愤不已!真正奇怪的是,我又一次想象他在某个演讲厅里演讲的情景,而这些话——虽然现在看来相当具有煽动性,但在1863年可能并没有那么具有煽动性。[这]反而凸显了……一部分人认为奴隶是次等人,我们这样做是为了他们好,如果我们不让他们成为我们的奴隶,他们就会变成异教徒,就会迷失方向。

I mean I can't believe that anybody thinks this. I can't believe! I mean this is awful. It really doesn't impact how I think about Lincoln. I'm really focused on this guy. I'm just outraged! The thing that is really strange is that, again, I can picture him speaking in some type of lecture hall, and again this being delivered and it not being—this is pretty inflammatory stuff, but I mean it probably wasn't all that inflammatory back in 1863. [It] kind of emphasizes how one section of the population viewed slaves as subhumans and we're doing this for their own good and if we didn't bring them into our servitude that they would be heathens and they'd be lost.

文件 4.6.废除声明

Document 4.6. Statement on Abolition


摘自威廉·劳埃德·加里森 (William Lloyd Garrison) 于1830 年 2 月 12 日在《普遍解放的天才》(Genius of Universal Emancipation)上发表的一篇社论。加里森 (1805–79) 是一位杰出的白人废奴主义者,在 1831 年创办自己的反奴隶制期刊之前,曾短暂担任《天才》的助理编辑

From an editorial by William Lloyd Garrison appearing in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, February 12, 1830. Garrison (1805–79) was a leading white abolitionist and worked for a short time as the assistant editor of the Genius before beginning his own antislavery periodical in 1831.

我否认上帝创造了……人类中的某一部分优于另一部分的说法。无论多少个种族融合在一起——无论部落或国家之间存在多少种肤色差异——只要给予他们相同的进步机会和公平的起点,结果都将同样辉煌、同样卓有成效、同样伟大。

I deny the postulate, that God has made…one portion of the human race superior to another. No matter how many breeds are amalgamated—no matter how many shades of color intervene between tribes or nations—give them the same chances to improve, and a fair start at the same time, and the result will be equally brilliant, equally productive, equally grand.


理想情况下,艾伦应该能够意识到,罗宾逊为奴隶制辩护的宗教理由,恰恰是林肯极力避免的那种论调。事实上,当林肯在谈及奴隶制时提及上帝,是为了强调不同种族的人们在上帝之下所共享的共同纽带(文献4.3)。从这个意义上讲,罗宾逊和林肯的观点可谓截然相反。

Ideally Ellen would have recognized that Robinson's religious justification for slavery is precisely the kind of statement Lincoln eschewed. Indeed, when Lincoln did refer to God in the context of slavery, it was to comment on the common bond under God shared by people of different races (Document 4.3). In this sense, Robinson and Lincoln could not have been further apart.

结论

CONCLUSION

这两位老师对这些文献的处理方法截然不同。对于历史系学生泰德来说,林肯的观点与这些文献中的文字直接对应;而物理系学生艾伦则对通过这些文献探寻“真实的”林肯持谨慎态度,她试图理解不同环境下不同时期的林肯。艾伦的解​​读与泰德的另一个区别在于,她对不同文献进行了大量的互文性分析。我们认为,这些交叉引用是她试图在本次任务的框架内,通过重构林肯所处的社会舆论环境来构建语境。在任务的最后,当艾伦遇到勒罗内·贝内特关于林肯是“一个悲剧性的缺陷人物,与他同时代的大多数白人一样抱有种族偏见”的说法时,她能够运用在本次任务中学到的知识来丰富这一论断。24 艾伦部分同意贝内特的说法,但她补充道:“林肯显然和……罗宾逊的想法不一样。”此外,她还对贝内特的文章本身进行了背景说明:“1968年,嗯,那一年,就在罗伯特·肯尼迪和马丁·路德·金遇刺之前。”

These two teachers differed dramatically in their approach to the documents. For Ted, the history major, Lincoln's views corresponded directly to the words in these documents; Ellen, the physics major, was wary of pursuing the “real” Lincoln through these documents, trying instead to understand the different Lincolns who responded to different circumstances. Further distinguishing Ellen's reading from Ted's were her many intertextual connections across documents. We view these cross-references as attempts to create a context within the confines of this task by reconstructing the climate of opinion in which Lincoln dwelled. At the end of the task, when Ellen encountered Lerone Bennett's claim that Lincoln was a “tragically flawed figure who shared the racial prejudice of most of his white contemporaries” she was able to use what she had learned in this task to add texture to this statement.24 Agreeing in part with Bennett's assertion, Ellen added this qualifier: “Lincoln clearly wasn't on the same wavelength as…Robinson.” Moreover, she contextualized Bennett's article itself: “1968, let's see, that was a year, this is just prior to the Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations.”

在整个过程中,艾伦在权衡林肯的观点时,始终保持着自己的立场。她能够表达反对意见,却并不感到惊讶。她可以拒绝,但仍然能够理解。在阅读斯蒂芬·道格拉斯的著作时,她注意到其中“极其种族主义的语言”,但她也指出,“这并非煽动性的言论。这只是事实,是有据可查的信念——这显然是真的,人人都知道。这就是所谓的传统智慧,常识。”艾伦在此获得了对历史的基本理解。过去并非仅仅是现在的序幕,而是与现在截然不同的。她将自己的观点与她所阅读的人物的观点拉开距离,使她能够像路易斯·O·明克所说的那样,将历史视为“一个持续不断的邀请,邀请我们去发现并进入与我们截然不同的视角”。 25 艾伦的理解具有相似之处。1850年白人社会所看到的,以及促使这个社会在美国土地上传播奴隶制的因素,与我们今天所看到的截然不同。

Throughout the task, Ellen gauged Lincoln's views without losing sight of her own. She was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand. When reading Stephan Douglas, she called attention to the “incredibly racist language” but noted that “it's not inflammatory. It's matter of fact, documented belief—this is obviously true, everyone knows it. It's what they would call conventional wisdom, common knowledge.” Ellen here achieved a fundamental historical understanding. The past is not mere prologue to the present but is discontinuous with it. The distance she created between her own views and those of the people she read about allowed her to view history, in Louis O. Mink's words, as a “standing invitation to discover and enter into modes of seeing quite different from our own.”25 What Ellen understood is analogous. What white society saw in 1850, what allowed this society to propagate the institution of slavery on American soil, is not what we see today.

两位教师提出的难题在于,历史学方面的学术训练与历史语境思维能力之间似乎存在一种反比关系。然而,这种模式并非完全反常;我们早期的研究结果,尽管样本量很小(仅12位教师),却表明本科专业与构建历史语境的能力之间并无明确的关联。

The two teachers here present the puzzle of an inverse relationship, or so it would seem, between academic training in history and the disposition to think contextually. This pattern, however, is not entirely anomalous; our early findings, although based on a very small sample (twelve teachers), showed no clear-cut relationship between undergraduate major and the ability to create a historical context.

这一发现虽属初步且暂定,但对于关注教师学科知识的研究者而言并非全新。 26本科专业教学的前提是学生在入学前已掌握学科的基本概念。而这些基本概念正是向学生传授该学科的核心。然而,通常情况下,大学一年级、二年级、三年级乃至四年级学生头脑中假定存在的这些概念很少经过检验、测试或评估。在很多情况下,大学教师所假定的基础仅仅是他们凭空想象出来的。

This finding, tentative and provisional, is not entirely new to researchers concerned with teacher's subject matter knowledge.26 The undergraduate major proceeds on the assumption that students have mastered fundamental disciplinary conceptions prior to coming to the university. It is precisely these fundamental conceptions that are at the center of teaching that discipline to the young. But, as is often the case, the notions presumed to exist in the minds of college freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors are rarely checked, tested, or assessed. In many cases, the foundation assumed by university instructors is a figment of their imaginations.

当历史系学生进入教育硕士项目时,我们假定他们精通历史。教师教育的任务是教导未来的教师如何教学。但是,如果……诸如此类的评估——这些评估使我们能够检验学科的基本假设——是否会削弱我们对学生基础知识的信心?当我们在教人如何教书的过程中意识到,我们首先必须教他们如何认识知识时,教师教育的工作就变得格外复杂了。

When history majors come to M.A. programs in teaching, we presume that they know their history. The job of teacher education is to teach prospective teachers about teaching. But what happens when assessments such as these, assessments that allow us to examine fundamental disciplinary assumptions, undermine our confidence in student's fundamental knowledge? The job of teacher education becomes doubly complicated when, in the midst of teaching people how to teach, we realize that we first must teach them how to know.

本章结尾,我提出了一个“那又怎样”的问题,因为如今人们经常听到“真实性评估”的说法,认为这种评估能够考察学生“像历史学家一样思考”的能力。这些说法常常得到热烈的赞同,但赞同的人往往从未问过一个更根本的问题:我们为什么要关心学生(或者教师)是否能够像历史学家一样思考?

I end this chapter with the “so what” question, for one hears a great deal nowadays about “authentic assessments” that tap student's ability to “think like historians.” These pronouncements are often greeted with enthusiastic nods, often by people who never ask a prior—and, in my eyes, more basic—question: Why should we care if students, or teachers for that matter, are able to think like historians?

这里所描述的那种历史思维方式,尤其是认识到自身概念体系的局限性并以此来思考过去的倾向,对于教导人们如何理解与自己不同的人至关重要。如果我们从未意识到个人经验的局限性,又怎能指望理解那些逻辑与我们相悖、用我们自身的标准来评判时显得难以理解的人呢?

Historical thinking of the type described here, and in particular the disposition to think about the past by recognizing the inadequacy of one's own conceptual apparatus, is essential in teaching people how to understand others different from themselves. If we never recognize that our individual experience is limited, what hope is there of understanding people whose logic defies our own, whose choices and beliefs appear inscrutable when judged against our own standards?

许多问题依然存在:我们并不确切地知道人们是如何学会情境思考的。我们不知道他们是在何时何地学会的。我们甚至不知道正规学习在情境思考能力发展过程中扮演着怎样的角色。然而,有一点我们确信无疑:情境思考能力并非如大卫·哈克特·费舍尔所言,是某种“纯粹的学术完美目标”。 27

Many questions remain: We do not know how, exactly, people learn to think contextually. We do not know where they learn it when they do. We do not even know the role of formal study in its development. We are convinced, however, of one thing: The ability to think contextually is not, in David Hackett Fischer's words, some “pristine goal of scholarly perfection.”27

如果我们继续犯下用核前思维来理解核世界问题的错误,就不会有后核世界。如果我们坚持用昨天的方案来解决今天的问题,我们可能会突然发现明天的可能性已经耗尽。如果我们在二十世纪中期继续追求十九世纪的意识形态目标,那么二十一世纪的前景将越来越黯淡。28

If we continue to make the…error of conceptualizing the problems of a nuclear world in prenuclear terms, there will not be a postnuclear world. If we persist in the error of applying yesterday's programs to today's problems, we may suddenly run short of tomorrow's possibilities. If we continue to pursue the ideological objectives of the nineteenth century in the middle of the twentieth, the prospects of a twenty-first are increasingly dim.28

正如菲舍尔提醒我们的那样,面对那些威胁要撕裂我们社会和世界的种种问题,理性是一种极其脆弱的武器。然而,它却是我们唯一拥有的武器。

Reason, as Fischer reminds us, is a pathetically frail weapon in the face of the problems that threaten to rend our society and our world. It is, however, the only weapon we possess.

笔记

NOTES

本章是为1992年10月在马德里自治大学举办的“历史与社会科学中的推理”研讨会而撰写的。它最初以印刷形式发表,由Janice Fournier担任第二作者,收录于一本基于……的书中。会议论文集:Mario Carretero 和 James F. Voss 主编,《历史与社会科学中的认知与教学过程》(新泽西州希尔斯代尔,1994 年);概述发表于《历史新闻》第 48 期(1993 年)。我运用相同的文献和方法,研究了历史学家如何解读这些文献(见第一章)。该研究的完整描述发表于《认知科学》第 22 期(1998 年),第 319-346 页。

 

This chapter was prepared for a conference on “Reasoning in History and the Social Sciences” at Autonoma University of Madrid in October 1992. It first appeared in print, with Janice Fournier as second author, in a book based on the conference: Mario Carretero and James F. Voss, eds., Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences (Hillsdale, N.J., 1994); an overview appeared in History News 48 (1993). Using the same documents and procedure, I studied how historians read these documents (see Chapter 1). A full description of that study appeared in Cognitive Science 22 (1998), 319–46.

 

1.亚伯拉罕·林肯,《演讲与著作》第 1-2 卷(纽约,1989 年),第 512 页。

1. Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, vols. 1–2 (New York, 1989), 512.

2. Lerone Bennett, Jr.,“亚伯拉罕·林肯是白人至上主义者吗?” Ebony》 23(1968 年 2 月),35-42。

2. Lerone Bennett, Jr., “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Ebony 23 (February 1968), 35–42.

3.布拉德利学校历史委员会,《构建历史课程:学校历史教学指南》华盛顿特区,1988 年),第 9 页。

3. Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools (Washington, D.C., 1988), 9.

4.此处并非为认知任务环境辩护之时,批评者抨击这些环境扭曲了思维在其“自然环境”中的运作方式。我们目前正处于对认知理解的钟摆式摇摆之中,人类学方法比心理学实验室中更为传统的实验条件更受青睐。我深切理解这些批评;例如,参见迈克尔·科尔和芭芭拉·米恩斯主编的《人们如何思考的比较研究:导论》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1981年)。然而,我们没有策略性地思考如何结合多种方法(每种方法都有其自身的局限性),而是陷入了非此即彼的争论,争论哪种方法最好。历史为这种思维弊病提供了一剂强效的解药。参见库尔特·勒温的《在特定时期定义“场域”》,载《心理学评论》第50卷第3期(1943年)。

4. This is not the place to offer a defense of cognitive task environments, which critics have assailed for distorting the way thinking goes on in its “natural habitat.” We are currently in the midst of a pendulum swing in understanding cognition, privileging anthropological approaches over the more traditional experimental conditions of the psychological laboratory. I am deeply sympathetic to the critiques; see, for example, Michael Cole and Barbara Means, eds., Comparative Studies of How People Think: An Introduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). However, rather than thinking strategically about how to combine multiple methods, each of which bears its own liabilities, we have debased ourselves with either/or contests over which method is best. The past offers a powerful antidote to this malady of thought. See Kurt Lewin, “Defining the ‘Field’ at a Given Time” Psychology Review 50, no. 3 (1943).

5.参见阿拉里克·K ·迪金森和彼得·J·李合著的《理解历史》(“Making Sense of History”),载于阿拉里克·K·迪金森、彼得·J·李和彼得·J·罗杰斯主编的《学习历史》(伦敦,1984年),第117-153页。李、迪金森及其同事丹尼斯·谢米尔特的开创性工作使一度萎靡不振、脆弱不堪的历史学习领域重焕生机。他们在20世纪80年代提出的问题至今仍在指导着全球各地的研究者。如果没有英国历史学习研究的影响,我无法想象自己的研究计划会是什么样子。

5. See Alaric K. Dickinson and Peter J. Lee, “Making Sense of History” in Alaric K. Dickinson, Peter J. Lee, and Peter J. Rogers, eds., Learning History (London, 1984), 117–53. The pioneering work of Lee, Dickinson, and their colleague Denis Shemilt invigorated a field that had grown moribund and brittle. The questions they framed in the eighties continue to guide researchers across the globe. I cannot envision my own program of research apart from the influence of the British work on learning history.

6.参见 Ronald Takaki 的著作《来自不同镜子的反思》,载教学宽容》 3 (1994),第 11-15 页;Winthrop D. Jordan 的著作《白人凌驾于黑人之上:美国人对黑人的态度,1550-1812 年》(纽约,1968 年);George Fredrickson 的著作《一个人,却不是兄弟:亚伯拉罕·林肯与种族平等》,载《南方历史杂志》 41 (1975),第 39-58 页。

6. See the work of Ronald Takaki, “Reflections from a Different Mirror” Teaching Tolerance 3 (1994), 11–15; Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York, 1968); George Fredrickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality” Journal of Southern History 41 (1975), 39–58.

7.大卫·哈克特·费舍尔,《历史学家的谬误:走向历史思想的逻辑》纽约,1970 年)。

7. David Hackett Fischer, Historian's Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York, 1970).

8.请参阅本书第 3 章

8. See Chapter 3 in this volume.

9. David N. Perkins,《心灵的最佳作品(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1981 年)。

9. David N. Perkins, The Mind's Best Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

10.先前对这些文件的研究表明,缺乏相关知识的人很容易对林肯生平事件的顺序感到困惑。为了减少这种情况的发生,并帮助参与者更好理解任务,我们制作了一份林肯生平重大事件的时间线,从他当选伊利诺伊州议员到遇刺身亡。参与者会拿到这份时间线,并被告知可以随时查阅。文件逐一呈现,每份文件打印在单独的页面上,文件来源以粗斜体字显示在页面顶部。参与者完成对每份文件的评述后,会被要求回顾性地报告“任何内容”。否则,你还记得你在阅读这份文件时的想法吗?”如果参与者在评论中没有明确提及林肯的观点(并且在阅读过程中也没有明确提及),他们会被问到:“这份文件对林肯的种族观点有何启示?”

10. Previous work with these documents showed that people with little content knowledge quickly became confused about the sequence of events in Lincoln's life. To lessen this possibility and to help orient participants to the task, we developed a timeline of major events in Lincoln's life, from his election to the Illinois legislature to his assassination. People were given this timeline and told to refer to it at any time. Documents were presented one by one, each printed on a separate page, with the source of the document appearing at the top of the page in bold italics. Once participants finished commenting on each text, they were asked to report retrospectively on “anything else you remember yourself thinking as you read this document.” If participants did not explicitly address Lincoln's views in their comments (and had not done so explicitly during the reading), they were asked, “What light does this document shed on Lincoln's views about race?”

11. Donald E. Fehrenbacher,“只有他的继子:林肯与黑人”内战史20 (1974),293–310。

11. Donald E. Fehrenbacher, “Only His Stepchildren: Lincoln and the Negro” Civil War History 20 (1974), 293–310.

12.理查德·霍夫施塔特,《美国政治传统及其缔造者》(纽约,1948 年)。

12. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948).

13.同上,第 116 页

13. Ibid., 116.

14. Richard M. Weaver,《修辞伦理学》芝加哥,1953 年)。

14. Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago, 1953).

15.林肯,演讲集》,第 325-26 页。

15. Lincoln, Speeches, 325–26.

16.同上,第 326 页

16. Ibid., 326.

17. Weaver,伦理学》,第95页。

17. Weaver, Ethics, 95.

18. Fredrickson ,“不是兄弟”42。

18. Fredrickson, “Not a Brother” 42.

19.有关历史学家如何权衡文献证据体裁的例子,请参见本书第3章。另见路易斯·戈特沙尔克,《理解历史:历史方法入门》芝加哥,1958年)。

19. See Chapter 3 in this volume for examples of historians weighing the genre of documentary evidence. See also Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method (Chicago, 1958).

20. Fredrickson ,“不是兄弟” 44。

20. Fredrickson, “Not a Brother” 44.

21.这份文件附带了一篇冗长的序言,因为试点工作表明,即使是那些学习过这一时期课程的读者,也很少有人熟悉林肯在中美洲建立自由奴隶殖民地的计划

21. This document was accompanied by a lengthy preamble because pilot work had shown that few readers, even those with course work in this period, were familiar with Lincoln's plans to establish colonies of freed slaves in Central America.

22.参见乔丹,白上黑》

22. See Jordan, White Over Black.

23. David Lowenthal,《过去是一个异国他乡》英国剑桥,1985 年);David Lowenthal,“永恒的过去:一些英美历史先入之见”,《美国历史杂志》 75(1989 年),1263-80。有关 Lowenthal 的最新立场,请参阅他的《被过去所占据:遗产十字军东征和历史的战利品》(纽约,1996 年)。

23. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, England, 1985); David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Preconceptions” Journal of American History 75 (1989), 1263–80. For an update on Lowenthal's positions, see his Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York, 1996).

24. Bennett,“是亚伯拉罕·林肯吗?” 42 .

24. Bennett, “Was Abe Lincoln” 42.

25. Louis O. Mink(Brian Fay、Eugene O. Golob 和 Richard T. Vann 编辑),《历史理解》 (纽约州伊萨卡,1987 年),第 103 页。

25. Louis O. Mink (Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann, eds.), Historical Understanding (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), 103.

26.参见国家教师学习研究中心,《学习教学的研究成果》(密歇根州东兰辛,1992 年)。

26. See the National Center for Research on Teacher Learning, Findings on Learning to Teach (East Lansing, Mich., 1992).

27. Fischer,历史学家的谬误》,第 215 页。

27. Fischer, Historian's Fallacies, 215.

28.同上

28. Ibid.

5

5

描绘过去

Picturing the Past

清空思绪,试着想象两位历史人物的形象:一位清教徒和一位西部拓荒者。你脑海中的清教徒戴着高高的黑色带扣帽子吗?还是戴着一顶小巧的蕾丝帽?你脑海中的拓荒者是戴着头巾和皮套裤放牛吗?还是戴着遮阳帽在草原上照看鸡群?为什么你会想到这些特定的形象?为什么有些形象比其他形象更容易浮现在脑海中?

Clear your mind and try to conjure up images of two historical figures, a Pilgrim and a Western Settler. Does your Pilgrim wear a tall black hat with a buckle? Or a small lace cap? Is your Settler herding cattle in bandanna and chaps? Or tending chickens on the prairie in a sunbonnet? Why do these particular images come to mind? And why do some of these images come to mind more easily than others?

这篇简短的练习旨在引出我们的主题:文化假设在历史学习中的作用。这些假设往往根深蒂固,被视为理所当然,以至于我们甚至意识不到它们的存在。在历史的学习和教学中,假设扮演着关键角色。它们标示着历史中哪些内容是重要的,并将易于理解的经典推到前台。我们通常不假思索地按照时间顺序组织历史,根据特定的政治、外交和军事事件划分时代:制宪会议、重建时期、新政时期、卡特总统时期。与此同时,我们将其他主题视为“特殊”内容,作为对主要叙事的补充或延伸,这些内容通常出现在教科书的侧边栏中,但很少出现在章末测试中。我们常常隐含的假设塑造了我们对历史核心和边缘、关注点和忽略点的认知。正是这些假设让我们在阅读“清教徒及其妻子”的故事时能够轻松理解。

This brief exercise serves to introduce our topic: the role of cultural assumptions in the learning of history. Often these assumptions run so deep and are so taken for granted that we do not even recognize them. In the learning and teaching of history, assumptions play a key role. They signal what is important in history, pushing to the forefront an easily recognized canon. Without much thought, we typically organize history chronologically, according to eras defined by specific political, diplomatic, and military events: the Constitutional Convention, Reconstruction, the New Deal, the Carter presidency. At the same time, we designate other topics as “special” as additions or supplements to the main story, often addressed in textbook sidebars but rarely in end-of-chapter tests. Often our implicit assumptions shape our ideas about what is central in history and what is peripheral, what to look for and what to overlook. Our assumptions allow us not to miss a beat when reading about “Pilgrims and their wives.”

想想历史教科书通常是如何处理殖民时期新英格兰的贸易问题的。标准的美国历史教科书通常是这样描述的。教科书通常会重点介绍“三角贸易”,即美洲殖民地、西印度群岛和英国之间交换奴隶、甘蔗和朗姆酒的网络。一本广为使用的教科书,温斯罗普·乔丹及其同事合著的《美国人》¹,用了近三页的篇幅来论述这一主题,并以粗体小标题“北方发展商业和城市——糖蜜与朗姆酒”作为引子。这两个词“糖蜜”和“朗姆酒”在后面的章节复习部分以及章末词汇表中均有出现。乔丹在叙述历史时强调的是民族国家的经济生活,就本书而言,这指的是人们从事的贸易和商业活动。

Consider how history textbooks normally treat the topic of trade in colonial New England. The standard U.S. history textbook routinely highlights the “triangular trade” the network through which the American colonies, the West Indies, and Great Britain exchanged slaves, sugar cane, and rum. One widely used textbook, The Americans by Winthrop Jordan and his colleagues,1 devotes nearly three pages to the topic, introducing it with a boldfaced subheading, “The North Develops Commerce and Cities—Molasses and Rumbullion.” These two terms, “molasses” and “rumbullion” appear later in the chapter review section and also as end-of-the-chapter vocabulary words. Jordan's emphasis in the telling of history is on the economic life of nation-states, which in this case means the trade and commercial activities that men engaged in.

在题为“家庭农场”的章节中,约旦的殖民经济中出现了女性的身影。我们了解到,女性“不停地操持着各种家务”,用金属锅做饭,在烟囱的空心隔间里烤东西,纺粗布,然后缝制成丈夫和孩子的衣服。约旦和他的同事写道:“她们用自制的肥皂在木桶里洗衣服和被褥”,而“大部分繁重的户外工作都由男性承担” 。²

Women appear in Jordan's colonial economy in the section headed “Family Farms” where we learn that women “performed an unending round of tasks” cooking in metal pots, baking in hollow compartments in the chimney, spinning rough cloth, and sewing it into clothes for husband and child. “They washed clothes and bedding in wooden tubs with soap they made themselves” write Jordan and his colleagues, while “men did most of the heavy outdoor work.”2

乔丹列举的任务清单,如同许多其他传统历史著作一样,将女性的存在局限于侍奉丈夫和家庭的角色。³这种叙述会让学生认为,在殖民时期和革命后的新英格兰,女性很少参与商品和服务的经济交换。然而,试想一下,如果我们对历史重要性的假设有所不同呢?试想一下,如果我们关注的不是商业活动,而是日常生活的点点滴滴呢?在这种历史叙述中,我们或许会了解到男女之间相互依存的伙伴关系,他们共同承担着家庭和社区的经济支持。除了朗姆酒的生产之外,还会加入让·罗兰·马丁所说的“生殖功能”——这一范畴涵盖了人类生命周期中的主要活动,这些活动在1790年和2001年都同样重要:受孕和分娩、养育子女、管理家庭和家务、照顾病人、照料临终者和逝者。⁴

Jordan's list of tasks, like so many other conventional histories, confines a woman's existence to her role as servant to husband and home.3 This account would lead students to believe that women rarely participated in the economic exchange of goods and services in colonial and post-Revolutionary New England. Imagine, however, that our assumptions about historical importance were different. Imagine that instead of commercial enterprise, our focus was the ordinary accounts of daily life. In this version of history, we might learn about the interdependent partnership of women and men engaged in the economic support of their families and communities. Added to the production of rum would be information about what Jean Roland Martin calls “reproductive functions”—a category that includes the major life-cycle activities that marked human existence as much in 1790 as in 2001: conception and birth, rearing children, managing families and households, caring for the sick, tending to the dying and dead.4

劳雷尔·撒切尔·乌尔里希荣获普利策奖的传记《助产士的故事》让我们得以一窥此类历史的样貌。5乌尔里希以玛莎·巴拉德的生平开篇,巴拉德是一位居住在缅因州哈洛韦尔的助产士,她在1785年至1812年间坚持写日记。乌尔里希的叙述中,我们了解到玛莎·巴拉德做了很多事。她不仅接生婴儿,还在其他方面有所欠缺。在不到一个月的时间里,即1787年8月3日至8月24日期间,她就……

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, A Midwife's Tale, provides a glimpse of what such a history might look like.5 Ulrich begins her story with the life of Martha Ballard, a midwife who lived in Hallowell, Maine, and kept a diary during the years 1785–1812. We learn from Ulrich's reconstruction that Martha Ballard did much more than deliver babies. In the course of less than one month, between August 3 and August 24, 1787, she

她接生了四名婴儿,处理了一起产科假警报,进行了十六次医疗出诊,为三具遗体做了葬礼准备,给一位邻居分发了药丸,为另一位邻居采集并配制了草药,还为自己的丈夫治疗了咽喉痛。用二十世纪的话来说,她同时扮演着助产士、护士、医生、殡仪员、药剂师和贤惠妻子的角色。此外,在记录自己工作的过程中,她也成为了重要记录的保存者,她所在城镇医疗史的编年史家。6

performed four deliveries, answered one obstetrical false alarm, made sixteen medical calls, prepared three bodies for burial, dispensed pills to one neighbor, harvested and prepared herbs for another, and doctored her own husband's sore throat. In twentieth-century terms she was simultaneously a midwife, nurse, physician, mortician, pharmacist, and attentive wife. Furthermore, in the very act of recording her work, she became a keeper of vital records, a chronicler of the medical history of her town.6

玛莎的故事以及其他类似的故事,传统上鲜为人知——无论是在我们现在的教科书中,还是在她同时代人的日记和记述中,都没有记载。亨利·休厄尔是玛莎在哈洛韦尔的邻居,他的日记涵盖的时期与玛莎的日记大致相同。但休厄尔的日记比玛莎·巴拉德的日记更接近温斯罗普·乔丹的编年史。我们从玛莎的日记(而非亨利的日记)中得知,在亨利的妻子塔比莎最终分娩之前,玛莎曾八次前往她的床边。我们依靠玛莎而非亨利的记载来了解塔比莎分娩时的种种并发症以及玛莎收取的​​服务费用。最后,也只有玛莎的日记记录了塔比莎·休厄尔如何通过制作和出售女帽积极参与女性经济活动。玛莎·巴拉德详细记录了许多经济往来,其中不乏女性之间关于服装、医疗保健、食品和药品的往来——这些往来从未出现在亨利·休厄尔的账簿中,也从未出现在温斯罗普·乔丹对殖民地时期和早期美国经济生活的描述中。如果我们沿用传统的历史意义认知,很容易想象教科书中会出现关于玛莎·巴拉德的侧边栏。但如果我们采用不同的历史意义认知,同样也能看到关于朗姆酒的侧边栏。

Martha's story and others like it have traditionally not been told—neither in our present textbooks nor in the diaries and accounts of her contemporaries. Henry Sewall was Martha's neighbor in Hallowell, and his diary covers roughly the same period as hers. But Sewall's diary more closely parallels Winthrop Jordan's chronicle than Martha Ballard's entries. From Martha's diary, not Henry's, we learn that Martha traveled on eight occasions to the bedside of Henry's own wife, Tabitha, before she finally delivered. We rely on Martha, not Henry, to tell us of the complications that attended Tabitha's delivery and the fees Martha charged for her services. And, finally, only Martha's diary records how Tabitha Sewall participated actively in the economy of women by making and selling bonnets. Martha Ballard details many economic exchanges, often between and among women, of clothing, health care, food, and medicine—exchanges that never appear in Henry Sewall's account books or in Winthrop Jordan's description of colonial and early American economic life. Using traditional assumptions about historical significance, we could easily imagine a textbook sidebar on Martha Ballard. But if we were to employ different assumptions about historical significance, we could just as easily see a sidebar on rum.

当然,并非所有历史观念都基于性别。但认识到性别如何影响我们对历史的理解,使我们能够质疑以往关于历史成就中“性别差异”的报道。从J. Carleton Bell和D. P. McCollum于1917年对德克萨斯州学童的研究(“几乎在所有班级中,男孩都明显优于女孩”) 7 ,到Diane Ravitch和Chester Finn于1987年关于首次全国历史与文学教育进步评估的报告 8 ,都指出男孩在历史知识方面优于女孩。这一发现被轻描淡写地呈现出来,却忽略了这种差异可能反映出当时的课程设置对女性生活关注不足的可能性。

Of course, not all historical preconceptions hinge on gender. But the recognition of how gender frames our understanding of history allows us to question previous reports of “sex differences” in historical achievement. From J. Carleton Bell's and D. P. McCollum's 1917 study of Texas schoolchildren (“boys were markedly superior to the girls in almost every class”)7 to Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn's 1987 report on the first National Assessment of Educational Progress in History and Literature,8 boys are reported to be superior to girls in historical knowledge. This finding is reported matter-of-factly, without considering the possibility that such differences reflect a curriculum that pays little attention to the lives of women.

在撰写历史或编写学校课程时,关于历史重要性的假设总是占据主导地位,而历史和学校课程的编写者历来都是男性。哲学家内尔·诺丁斯(Nel Noddings 提出疑问:为什么学生更容易了解潘兴将军和巴顿将军,而不是1946年诺贝尔和平奖得主艾米莉·格林·巴尔奇?诺丁斯指出,巴尔奇的名字“甚至没有出现在20世纪50年代出版的一部主要百科全书中”,而两位将军却占据了篇幅很长的条目。问道:发动战争的人比维护和平的人更值得被关注吗?

Assumptions about historical importance loom large whenever we write history or school curricula, and the writers of each have traditionally been men. The philosopher Nel Noddings9 asks why students are more likely to know about Generals Pershing and Patton than about Emily Green Balch, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. According to Noddings, Balch's name “does not even appear in a major encyclopedia published in the fifties” whereas lengthy entries are devoted to the two generals.10 She asks: Are those who wage war more worthy of comment than those who wage peace?

尽管近年来历史/社会研究课程日益受到学术界的关注,但性别与学生历史理解之间的关系这一问题却鲜有研究涉及。 11然而,在学校里,人们已经做出了一些尝试,将更多女性史和社会史的内容融入现有课程。 12 事实上,加利福尼亚州和其他一些主要州的教科书选用标准要求社会研究教材必须体现男性和女性贡献的均衡比例。 13这些努力是否改变了孩子们对历史的认知?这正是我们着手探究的问题。

Although in recent years the history/social studies curriculum has become an area of increased scholarly attention, the issue of gender and student's historical understanding has received attention in only a few studies.11 In schools, however, there have been several attempts to integrate more women's and social history into existing curricula.12 Indeed, textbook adoption criteria in California and other major states require that social studies texts reflect an equal balance of male and female contributions.13 Have any of these efforts changed children's images of the past? This is what we set out to explore.

方法

METHOD

我们的问题很简单:男孩和女孩如何看待过去?当历史角色不分性别时,孩子们会如何将自己投射到这些历史角色中?我们选择了三种历史人物,分别来自美国历史上的不同世纪——清教徒、西部拓荒者和嬉皮士——并设计了一份简短的问卷。

Our question was straightforward: How do boys and girls picture the past? In what ways do children project themselves into historical roles when those roles are gender-neutral? We selected three kinds of historical figures, each from a different century in American history—Pilgrims, Western Settlers, and Hippies—and constructed a short questionnaire.

由于这是一项探索性研究,我们并未事先列出正式的假设,部分原因是找不到其他明确研究小学生如何描绘美国历史人物的文献。但我们并非毫无头绪。数十年来对儿童绘画的研究表明,我们可以预期存在一种“性别中心主义”的偏见;也就是说,男孩倾向于画男性人物,女孩倾向于画女性人物。四十多年的临床心理学研究表明,当给孩子提供“画一个完整的人”这样不具体的提示时,他们绝大多数都会画出反映自身性别的图像。 14 此外,当要求孩子同时画男性和女性人物时,他们通常会先画与自己性别相同的人物,并添加更多细节。 15儿童绘画研究领域的领军人物之一伊丽莎白·科皮茨认为,“画一个人”的提示实际上是在邀请孩子创作一幅图画。孩子最了解的人。“孩子最了解的人就是他自己;因此,他对一个人的印象就成了他内心世界的写照。” 16

Since this was an exploratory study, we did not set out with a list of formal hypotheses, in part because we could find no other work that looked explicitly at how schoolchildren depicted figures from the American past. But we were not without ideas about what we might find. Decades of research on children's drawing suggested that we could expect a “gendercentric” bias; that is, boys would tend to draw male figures, and girls female ones. Over forty years of clinical psychological research has shown that when children are provided with the nonspecific prompt to “draw a whole person” they overwhelmingly draw images that reflect their own gender.14 Further, when children are asked to draw both male and female figures they typically draw the figure of their own sex first and provide more detail to that drawing.15 Elizabeth Koppitz, one of the leading researchers on children's drawings, sees the charge to “draw a person” as an invitation for the child to draw a picture of the person the child knows best. “The person a child knows best is himself; his picture of a person becomes therefore a portrait of his inner self.”16

在我们的问卷中,我们并没有要求孩子们画一个普通的“人物”,而是让他们画出媒体和主流文化中通常被描绘成男性的形象。学生们会把我们的提示理解为邀请他们把自己描绘成清教徒、定居者或嬉皮士(在这种情况下,我们会看到男女作品数量相等),还是我们的问卷会引导他们描绘出一系列通常以男性形象出现的文化偶像?

In our questionnaire we did not ask children to draw a generic “person” but to draw figures typically portrayed as male in the media and the culture at large. Would students see our prompts as invitations to depict themselves in the roles of Pilgrims, Settlers, or Hippies (in which case we would see equal numbers of male and female drawings), or would our questionnaire elicit a set of cultural icons typically male in form?

每份问卷都只涉及这些人物中的一位,并且每份问卷都包含两部分。第一部分要求孩子们“想出一个清教徒”(“西部拓荒者”、“嬉皮士”),并在“下面的方框中”画出他们的形象。第二部分要求孩子们先阅读一段关于他们所选历史人物的简短的、类似教科书式的段落,然后为这段段落配图。我们尽量设计在形式和内容上都保持性别中立的段落;我们使用复数代词,并且描述的是男性和女性都会参与的活动(见附录)。17我们设计第二部分的目的之一是激发学生对学校历史的理解。我们想知道,教科书式的文字是否会唤起一种“学校历史框架”,从而导致学生对历史人物进行更传统的描绘,或者段落的性别中立性是否会引导学生同时描绘男性和女性的形象。与第一部分不同,第二部分的题目要求学生通过绘制多个人物形象来阐释文章内容,例如:“清教徒耕作土地”、“西部拓荒者乘坐篷车”或“嬉皮士参加抗议”。因此,每个孩子都有两次机会描绘过去:一次是在问卷的开头,另一次是在阅读完结尾一段类似教科书的短文之后。

Each of the questionnaires dealt with only one of these figures, and each had two parts. Part 1 asked children to “think of a Pilgrim” (“Western Settler” “Hippie”) and to draw their depiction “in the box below.” Part 2 asked children to first read and then illustrate a short, textbook-like passage about their historical figure. We tried to design passages that were gender-neutral in form and content; our sentences used plural pronouns and were about activities in which both men and women engaged (see Appendix).17 One of our intentions in designing part 2 was to engage student's ideas about school history. We wondered whether the textbook prose would invoke a “school history framework” that would lead to more traditional depictions of historical figures, or whether the gender neutrality of the passage would lead students to draw both male and female figures. In contrast to part 1, the prompt in part 2 asked students to illustrate the passage by drawing multiple figures: “Pilgrims farming the land” “Western Settlers in a wagon” or “Hippies at a protest.” Each child, then, had two opportunities to depict the past: at the beginning of the questionnaire and following a short, textbook-like passage at the end.

样本

SAMPLE

我们对五年级和八年级的学生进行了问卷调查。我们从华盛顿州普吉特海湾地区一个白人中产阶级社区的一所郊区小学(幼儿园至六年级)抽取了73名五年级学生作为样本。我们在三个五年级班级中对27名男生和46名女生进行了问卷调查。我们的第二个调查地点是同一地区一个类似的白人中产阶级社区的一所中学。在这所学校,我们向四个八年级班级中的51名男生和37名女生发放了问卷。在两所学校,我们都对每个年级的所有班级进行了抽样调查。我们在十月初发放了问卷,当时学生们还没有太多时间学习。他们接触过与其年级相符的历史/社会研究课程。虽然我们没有就教师们此前所教授的内容进行访谈,但我们认为他们并未提及历史中的性别角色问题,而且他们课堂上使用的教科书也没有明确涉及这一主题。

We administered the questionnaires to fifth- and eighth-grade students. Seventy-three fifth graders were drawn from a suburban elementary school (K-6) located in a white, middle-class community in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. We administered the questionnaire to twenty-seven boys and forty-six girls in three fifth-grade classrooms. Our second site was a middle school in a similar white, middle-class district in the same area. In this school we gave the questionnaire to fifty- one boys and thirty-seven girls from four eighth-grade classrooms. In both schools we sampled all classrooms at each grade level. We administered the questionnaire in early October, before students had much exposure to the history/social studies curriculum for their grade level. Although we did not interview teachers about the material they had covered to this point, we do not believe that they had raised the issue of sex roles in history, nor was it a topic explicitly raised by the textbooks used in their classrooms.

程序

PROCEDURE

我们向孩子们做了自我介绍,并解释说我们很想了解“像你们这样的孩子是如何看待过去的”。我们向他们保证,我们的问卷“不是绘画比赛”,每一份回答对我们来说都很重要。我们也解释说,并非每个人都会拿到同样的问卷。我们分发了三个版本的问卷,每个班级大约三分之一的学生分别拿到了关于清教徒、西部拓荒者或嬉皮士的问卷,而且相邻座位的学生拿到的问卷也不相同。完成问卷大约需要25到30分钟。

We introduced ourselves to the children and explained that we were interested in how “kids like you think about the past.” We assured them that our questionnaire was “not a drawing contest” and that each response was important to us. We also explained that not everyone would get the same form. We distributed the three versions of the questionnaire so that about one-third of the students in each class received the form for Pilgrims, Western Settlers, or Hippies, and students sitting next to each other did not receive the same form. The questionnaire took about twenty-five to thirty minutes to complete.

分析

ANALYSIS

在分析数据之前,我们从每份问卷中删除了姓名和性别信息,以便在不知道作者性别的情况下进行编码。然后,我们随机抽取了30份问卷,建立了一套编码方案,用于判断学生所绘人物的性别。简而言之,该编码方案遵循以下准则:男性清教徒穿着裤子和/或带有明显帽檐或帽冠的帽子;女性清教徒穿着连衣裙或裙子、戴着软帽和/或留着长发;男性定居者的特征是穿着裤子、宽边帽、靴子或马刺;女性定居者的特征是穿着连衣裙或裙子、戴着软帽和留着长发;男性嬉皮士留着胡须、头发竖立而不是垂落、头发较短或没有头发,并佩戴腰带和/或靴子;女性嬉皮士的特征是穿着连衣裙或裙子、头发或衣服上装饰着鲜花、佩戴耳环和/或具有女性化的面部特征,例如弓形嘴唇或夸张的睫毛。无法通过这些特征区分的图形被编码为“模糊不清”。尽管问卷要求绘制单个图形,但第一部分中的一些图形被编码为“多个图形”。在第二部分中,学生被要求绘制多个图形,图形被编码为(a)全部为男性,(b)全部为女性,(c)模糊不清,或(d)包含男性和女性。18

Before analyzing the data, we removed the name and sex from each questionnaire so that coding would be done without knowing whether the artist was a boy or girl. We then used thirty randomly selected questionnaires to create a coding scheme for determining the sex of the figures drawn by students. In abbreviated form, the coding scheme used the following guidelines: Male Pilgrims wore pants and/or a hat with an obvious brim or crown, female Pilgrims wore a dress or skirt, bonnet, and/or had long hair; male Settlers were distinguished by pants, broad-brimmed hat, boots, or spurs; female Settlers were again distinguished by a dress or skirt, bonnet, and long hair; male Hippies had facial hair, hair that stood on end rather than hanging, short hair, or no hair, and wore a belt and/or boots; female Hippies were distinguished by a dress or skirt, flowers in hair or on clothing, earrings, and/or feminine facial features, such as bow-shaped lips or exaggerated eyelashes. Figures that could not be distinguished by these features were coded as “ambiguous.” Some drawings in part 1 were coded as “multiple figures” despite the questionnaire's directions to draw a single figure. In part 2, where students were instructed to draw multiple figures, drawings were coded as (a) all male, (b) all female, (c) ambiguous, or (d) including both sexes.18

结果

RESULTS

我们首先注意到的是学生们丰富的想象力和绘画作品的多样性。图 5.1展示了一些历史人物的典型作品。我们按学生性别、年级和历史提示对数据进行了分类。男生的回答表现出惊人的一致性;年级和提示之间没有显著差异。表 5.1中的数据已按年级汇总;结果表明,男生对第一部分中三个提示的回答基本一致。总的来说,在完成这项任务的 76 名男生中,有 64 名画的是男性清教徒、男性定居者或男性嬉皮士;换句话说,我们样本中 84% 的男生画的是男性人物。唯一一个画女性人物的男生是在回答嬉皮士提示时画的。其余 11 名男生(14%)画的是“模糊”的人物,其中大多数是在回答嬉皮士提示时画的(6 个人物,占总数的 8%),或者画的是多个人物的图画(5 个,占总数的 7%)。

Our first impression was of the vividness of student's imaginations and the variety in their drawings. Figure 5.1 shows some of the exemplary depictions of each historical figure. We separated the data by sex of student, grade level, and historical prompt. Boys' responses showed remarkable consistency; there were no significant differences for grade level or prompt. The data shown in Table 5.1 are collapsed across grade levels; they indicate that boys responded similarly to each of the three prompts in part 1. Overall, sixty-four of the seventy-six boys who completed this task drew male Pilgrims, male Settlers, or male Hippies; in other words, 84 percent of the boys in our sample depicted male figures. The one instance in which a boy drew a female figure came in response to the Hippie prompt. The remaining eleven boys (14 percent) drew either “ambiguous” figures, most often in response to the Hippie prompt (six figures, or 8 percent of the total), or pictures of multiple figures (five, or 7 percent).

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女孩们的回答则不那么直接。虽然年级对结果没有显著影响,但五年级和八年级的女孩对三个提示的反应都与男孩不同(表5.2)总体而言,女孩们绘制的女性和男性人物数量大致相等。在完成第一部分的80名女孩中,28名(35%)绘制了女性清教徒、定居者或嬉皮士的形象,而26名(33%)绘制了相应的男性形象。然而,这种模式并非在所有提示中都一致。女孩们绘制女性清教徒和嬉皮士的频率高​​于绘制女性西部定居者(见表5.2);在回答“定居者”这一提示时,近三分之二的女孩绘制了单个男性形象(23人中有15人,即65%),这表明这些女孩在“描绘”这些历史人物时运用了不同的认知框架。 19

Girls' responses were less straightforward. Although no significant effects were found for grade level, girls in both fifth and eighth grades responded differently from the boys to the three prompts (Table 5.2). In general, girls drew approximately equal numbers of female and male figures. Of the eighty girls who completed part 1, twenty-eight (35 percent) drew pictures of female Pilgrims, Settlers, or Hippies, while twenty-six (33 percent) drew their male counterparts. This pattern, however, was not consistent across the prompts. Girls drew female Pilgrims and Hippies more often than female Western Settlers (see Table 5.2); responding to the Settler prompt, almost two-thirds of the girls drew single male figures (fifteen of twenty-three, or 65 percent), suggesting that these girls brought a different schema to bear when “picturing” each of these historical figures.19

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我们发现了男孩和女孩绘画的另一个差异。有20名学生没有按照第一部分的要求画单个人物,而是画了多个人物。如表5.1和表5.2所示,女孩犯这种“错误”的可能性是男孩的三倍。如果“清教徒”、“定居者”或“嬉皮士”这些词不能让人联想到某个特定的历史人物,那么它们会让人联想到什么呢?为了回答这个问题,我们分析了画了多个人物的5名男孩(7%)和15名女孩(19%)的画作(表5.3)

We discovered another difference between boys's and girls' drawings. Twenty students disregarded the directions in part 1 to draw a single figure and drew multiple figures instead. As shown by the totals of multiple figures in Tables 5.1 and 5.2, girls were three times as likely to make this “mistake” as boys. If “Pilgrim” “Settler” or “Hippie” did not call to mind a picture of a single historical figure, what images did these words elicit? To answer this question, we analyzed the drawings of the five boys (7 percent) and fifteen girls (19 percent) who drew multiple figures (Table 5.3).

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在女孩创作的十五幅多人绘画作品中,有十三幅(87%)描绘了男女在一起的场景,十五幅中有十二幅(80%)描绘了情侣或家庭的形象(见图5.2)对于这十二位女孩来说,“清教徒”、“定居者”或“嬉皮士”并非以单个人物来表现,而是以家庭或社会单元的形式呈现。

Thirteen of fifteen multiple-figure drawings by girls (87 percent) depicted men and women together, and twelve of the fifteen (80 percent) depicted images of couples or families (see Figure 5.2). For these twelve girls, a “Pilgrim” “Settler” or “Hippie” was represented not by a single figure, but by a family or social unit.

“家庭意象”并非男孩们所描绘的画面。在第一部分中,画多个人物的男孩与只画单个人物的男孩相比,并不更有可能想象一个由女性组成的过去。所有五个画多个人物的男孩都画了男性(表5.3),其中三个男孩的画作带有暴力意味(见图5.3)换句话说,当男孩们画多个人物时,他们的画作更多地展现的是男性之间的战斗,而非合作。 20

The “family image” was not the picture elicited from boys. Boys who drew multiple figures in part 1 were no more likely to envision a past inhabited by women than were the boys who drew single figures. All five of the boys who drew multiple figures drew men (Table 5.3), and in three of five cases the images contained violent overtones (see Figure 5.3). In other words, when boys drew multiple figures, their pictures more often showed men engaged in combat than in cooperation.20

如果布置一项任务,要求学生绘制多个人物,是否会增加描绘清教徒、定居者和嬉皮士的男女混合形象的数量?为了解答这个问题,我们分析了问卷第二部分的回答。我们想知道,学生在第二部分(要求他们根据一段关于清教徒、定居者或嬉皮士的性别中立段落进行配图)中的回答,与他们在问卷第一部分(要求他们描绘单个人物)中的回答有何不同。

Would a task that instructed students to draw multiple figures lead to a greater number of mixed-sex pictures of Pilgrims, Settlers, and Hippies? This question was addressed by examining the responses in part 2 of the questionnaire. We wondered how the student's responses in this section, in which they were asked to illustrate a gender-neutral passage about Pilgrims, Settlers, or Hippies, would compare with their responses in part 1, the depiction of a single figure.

同样,大多数男孩(57%,即完成第二部分的60名男孩中的34名)选择绘制男性形象(表5.4)虽然这一比例低于第一部分中绘制男性形象的91%(回想一下,男孩们绘制的多人形象中只有男性),但第二部分中没有男孩的画作单独描绘女性。此外,增幅最大的类别并非“男女皆有”,而是“性别模糊”。虽然在画作中包含女性的男孩人数从第一部分的1人(唯一的嬉皮士女性)增加到第二部分的7人,但性别模糊的人物数量却增加了四倍。我们推测,造成这种增长的原因可能包括以下一个或两个:任务的限制使得学生没有足够的时间或动力来完成一幅精细的画作(第二部分中有很多简笔画);或者,学生被要求描绘的场景(清教徒耕作、定居者乘坐篷车或嬉皮士抗议)不适合描绘特写细节。

Again, a majority of boys (57 percent, or thirty-four of the sixty boys who completed part 2) responded by drawing male figures (Table 5.4). Although this number is less than the 91 percent who drew male figures in part 1 (recall that boys'#x0027;s drawings of multiple figures showed only men), none of the boys'#x0027;s drawings in part 2 depicted women alone. In addition, the category showing the greatest increase was not “both male and female” but “ambiguous.” Although the number of boys who included women in their drawings rose from one in part 1 (the single female Hippie) to seven in part 2, the number of ambiguous figures increased fourfold. Reasons for this rise, we speculated, might include one or both of the following: the constraints of the task left students with little time or motivation to complete a detailed drawing (there were many stick-figure drawings in part 2); or the scene students were asked to illustrate (Pilgrims farming, Settlers in a wagon, or Hippies at a protest) was not suited to close-up detail.

然而,女生的数据对这两种解释都鲜有支持。虽然完成第二部分问卷的男生比第一部分少了16人,但未完成课本段落插图的女生只比男生少了7人,这表明问卷的填写时间是充足的。此外,如表5.5所示,女生回答中被标记为“含糊不清”的比例并没有从第一部分到第二部分显著增加;即使在这些“远景”场景中,女生也提供了足够的细节来区分男性和女性人物。(难道女生只是更认真、更注重细节吗?如果是这样,那么为什么有19%的女生在第一部分中忽略了指示呢?)21

The data from girls, however, provided little support for either explanation. While sixteen fewer boys completed part 2 than part 1, only seven fewer girls failed to complete their illustrations of textbook passages, suggesting that the time allotted to complete the questionnaire was adequate. In addition, as Table 5.5 shows, the percentage of girls' responses coded as “ambiguous” did not increase significantly from part 1 to part 2; even in these “far-away” scenes, girls included sufficient detail to distinguish male from female figures. (Are girls simply more conscientious students and more detail-oriented? If this is the case, then why did 19 percent of the girls disregard the directions in part 1?)21

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在第二部分中,男孩和女孩的回答还出现了其他差异。虽然课本段落使女孩绘制的包含男性和女性人物的图画数量增加了10%,但同时也使仅包含男性人物的图画数量增加了近10%(9.5%)。然而,与第一部分一样,女孩对三个提示的反应各不相同。阅读课本段落后,女孩绘制男性朝圣者的次数是男孩的两倍多。 与之前相比,这种情况更为常见(59% 对 28%),而第 1 部分和第 2 部分中定居者绘画的模式基本保持不变(表 5.6)

Additional differences emerged in girls' and boys'#x0027;s responses to part 2. Although the textbook passage elicited from girls a 10 percent increase in the number of drawings that included male and female figures, it also elicited a nearly equal increase (9.5 percent) in the number of drawings containing male figures alone. As with part 1, however, the girls responded differently to each of the three prompts. After reading the textbook passage, girls drew a male Pilgrim or Pilgrims more than twice as often as before (59 percent versus 28 percent), while the pattern of Settler drawings across parts 1 and 2 remained largely unchanged (Table 5.6).

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这一发现不仅揭示了女孩们对三种历史提示的不同反应,也揭示了阅读教科书式文章可能对女孩历史观念产生的影响。即使形式和内容都无性别之分,教科书式的散文是否也存在某种特质,会让女孩们误以为过去主要由男性组成?我们不禁思考,为什么阅读一篇关于清教徒(或嬉皮士)的教科书文章会如此深刻地改变女孩们对历史的最初认知,而阅读一篇关于西部拓荒者的文章却几乎不受影响?

This finding speaks not only to the differential responses to the three historical prompts but also to the effect that reading a textbook-like passage may have on girls' conceptions of history. Is there something about textbook-like prose, even when the form and content are gender-neutral, that makes girls imagine that the past was populated mostly by men? And why, we wondered, were girls' initial pictures of the past so greatly altered by reading a textbook passage on Pilgrims (or Hippies), yet minimally affected by a passage on Western Settlers?

这些回答模式促使我们重新审视问卷中是否存在性别偏见。虽然第一部分中的每个提示都只是要求学生“画一个清教徒(西部拓荒者、嬉皮士)”,但第二部分却要求学生画出“清教徒耕作的场景”、“拓荒者乘坐篷车的场景”或“嬉皮士参加抗议的场景”。实际上,这些提示可以被理解为提出了不同的问题:第一部分是“谁是清教徒?”,第二部分是“谁是耕作的清教徒?” ;“谁是西部拓荒者?”,第二部分是“谁乘坐拓荒者的篷车?”;“谁是嬉皮士?”,第二部分是“谁参加抗议活动?”。在女孩们的认知中,似乎男性和女性都可以是清教徒,但耕作的清教徒通常是男性。(我们注意到此处存在历史不准确之处,因为除了大规模农业之外,殖民时期的耕作通常由女性承担。)女孩们也把大多数定居者想象成男性,以及少数定居者家庭,这些人正是乘坐马车的人。(然而,似乎女性从未驾驶过马车。)男孩们的回答(表5.7)与女孩们的回答基本相同,只是在“嬉皮士”这一提示的回答上有所不同。男孩和女孩都认为男性、女性(以及许多身份模糊的人物)参与了抗议活动。

These response patterns led us to reexamine our questionnaire for sex bias. Although each of the prompts in part 1 asked students simply to “draw a Pilgrim (Western Settler, Hippie)” the prompts in part 2 asked students to draw a picture of either “Pilgrims farming the land” “Settlers riding in a covered wagon” or “Hippies at a protest.” In effect, these prompts might be construed as asking different questions: “Who is a Pilgrim?” in part 1 versus “Who is a farming Pilgrim?” in part 2; “Who is a Western Settler?” versus “Who rides in a Settler wagon?”; and “Who is a Hippie?” versus “Who participates in protests?” In girls' minds, it would seem, both men and women can be Pilgrims, but Pilgrim farmers are men. (We note the historical inaccuracy here, for, with the exception of large-scale agriculture, farming in colonial times was often done by women.) Girls also pictured most Settlers as men, along with a few Settler families, and these are the same people who ride in wagons. (However, it seems that women never drove the wagon.) In boys'#x0027;s responses (Table 5.7), the answers to these questions were largely the same, except in response to the Hippie prompt. For both the boys and the girls, men and women (and many ambiguous figures) participated in protests.

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在三个提示中,“嬉皮士”提示引发的差异最大。如表5.65.7所示,男孩和女孩的嬉皮士绘画模式都不同于清教徒或定居者的绘画模式。对“嬉皮士”提示的回答也最接近我们预期的结果,即儿童在绘制历史人物时倾向于想象与自己性别相同的人(类似于他们在通用“画人测试”中的回答)。在第一部分中,大多数男孩画的是男性嬉皮士,大多数女孩画的是女性嬉皮士。此外,在第二部分中,男孩和女孩在绘制嬉皮士时,比在绘制清教徒或定居者时更频繁地同时包含男性和女性。虽然仍然不是大多数,但在“嬉皮士”一栏中,同时包含男性和女性形象的图片比例显著增加。(大量模糊不清的人物形象可以被视为反映了“嬉皮士”提示的雌雄同体性质。)

Of the three prompts, the Hippie prompt elicited the greatest variation. For both boys and girls, as shown in Tables 5.6 and 5.7, the pattern of Hippie drawings was different from the patterns of Pilgrim or Settler drawings. Responses to the Hippie prompt also came closest to what we would expect if children possessed a psychological propensity to picture someone of their own sex when drawing a historical figure (similar to their responses in the generic Draw-a-Person Test). Most boys drew male Hippies and most girls drew female Hippies in response to part 1. Additionally, when illustrating the textbook passage in part 2, boys and girls more frequently included both men and women in their drawings of Hippies than in their drawings of Pilgrims or Settlers. Although still not the majority, a sharp increase is seen in the percentage of pictures including both male and female figures in the Hippie column. (The large number of ambiguous figures overall can be seen as reflecting the androgynous nature of the “Hippie” prompt.)

对这一发现的一种可能解释是,我们在嬉皮士绘画中观察到了多样性,描绘的对象涵盖了从越战抗议者、伍德斯托克音乐节参与者到垃圾摇滚爱好者和商场闲逛者等各种人群。这些图像表明,对一些学生来说,嬉皮士并非历史人物,而是生活在当下的人们。这一发现也反映了面向小学和初中学生的历史教科书中对嬉皮士的着墨甚少。具有讽刺意味的是,这些绘画中呈现的男女混合嬉皮士形象在历史上最为准确,而以男性为主导的嬉皮士形象则不然。朝圣者和西部拓荒者——这些学生眼中真正的“历史人物”——并非如此。

One possible explanation of this finding is suggested by the variety we noted in the Hippie drawings, depictions that ranged from Vietnam War protesters and Woodstock attendees to grunge rock enthusiasts and shopping mall loiterers. These images suggest that, for some students, Hippies are not historical figures but people who inhabit the present. This finding also reflects the scant coverage accorded to Hippies in history texts intended for elementary and middle-school students. Ironically, the mixed-sex images of Hippies that emerged from these drawings are historically the most accurate, while the male-biased images of Pilgrims and Western Settlers—the genuine “historical figures” to these students—are not.

讨论

DISCUSSION

这项研究并非对儿童历史观念的深入调查,我们所采用的问卷形式也只能部分揭示儿童如何理解我们布置的任务。然而,鉴于我们的目的——了解儿童头脑中的历史意象——这些问卷发挥了有益的作用。它们如同镜子一般,反映了学生对三个历史提示的快速反应,甚至可能是他们无意识的反应,正如艾伦·兰格(Ellen Langer)所定义的那样——一种几乎无需思考的回应。22这些图画揭示了学生一些日常的历史观念,这些观念尚未受到“伟大的清教徒女性”或“边疆女牛仔”等专题单元的影响。

This study was not an in-depth investigation of children's conceptions of history, and the form of the questionnaire we administered sheds only partial light on how children construed the task we set for them. However, given our purpose—to understand something about the historical images in children's minds—the questionnaires served a useful function. They acted as a kind of mirror for student's quick reactions to three historical prompts, perhaps even their mindless reactions, in the sense in which Ellen Langer uses the term—a response that requires little thinking.22 The drawings revealed something of student's ordinary historical conceptions, as yet untouched by special units on “Great Pilgrim Women” or “Cowgirls of the Frontier.”

在我们评估的289幅画作中,最引人注目的是男孩和女孩不同的反应模式。我们预感可能会发现同性偏好,尤其是在第一部分中的单人绘画中;我们认为女孩更倾向于画女性形象,而男孩则更倾向于画男性形象。我们也相信第二部分中性别中立的段落会引导学生联想到男性和女性的形象。我们的预测对女孩来说相当准确,她们的画作总体上描绘了一个由男性、女性和儿童组成的过去世界。但即使是女孩,画作中描绘男性形象的比例也最高。在第一部分和第二部分中,女孩共创作了153幅画作,其中58幅(占38%)只画了男性;只画女性的画作只有35幅(占23%)。其余的画作则描绘了男女同时出现(34幅,占22%)或性别模糊的人物形象(25幅,占16%)。

Most striking about the 289 pictures we evaluated are the different response patterns for girls and boys. We had a hunch that we might find a same-sex bias, particularly in the single-figure drawings of part 1; girls, we thought, would more often draw female figures, and boys more male. We also believed that the gender-neutral passages in part 2 would lead students to conjure up images of both men and women. Our predictions turned out to be fairly accurate for girls, whose drawings overall depicted a past populated by men, women, and children. But even for girls, the largest percentage of drawings depicted male figures alone. Of the 153 drawings produced by girls in parts 1 and 2 combined, fifty- eight (or 38 percent) were of men alone; drawings of women alone numbered only thirty-five (23 percent) of the total. The remaining drawings depicted men and women together (thirty-four, or 22 percent) or ambiguous figures (twenty-five, or 16 percent).

我们关注女孩们在描绘类似教科书的段落时,倾向于描绘一个女性少于男性的过去。23但我们同样关注男孩们在描绘一个几乎完全由男性主导的过去时的倾向。在这些男孩的画作中,无论是描绘清教徒、定居者还是嬉皮士,女性几乎都隐形。在男孩们创作的136幅画作中,只有8幅(6%)包含女性形象;其中7幅(5%)描绘了男女同时出现,只有1幅(不到1%)描绘了单独的女性。相比之下,男孩们在103幅画作中只画了男性形象。76%的图画清晰可见;其余25幅图画(18%)被判定为含义模糊。如果这些模式表明女孩对过去的认知存在偏差,那么男孩岂不成了一只眼睛瞎了?

We are concerned about girls' tendency, particularly when illustrating textbook-like passages, to depict a past inhabited by fewer women than men.23 But we are equally concerned about boys'#x0027;s tendency to depict a past inhabited almost exclusively by men. Women are virtually invisible in these boys'#x0027;s pictures, whether they show Pilgrims, Settlers, or Hippies. Of the 136 drawings produced by boys, only eight (6 percent) contained female figures; seven of these (5 percent) depicted men and women together, and only one (less than 1 percent) depicted a woman alone. In contrast, boys drew male figures exclusively in 103 drawings (76 percent); the remaining twenty-five drawings (18 percent) were coded as ambiguous. If these patterns suggest that girls view the past with less than 20–20 vision, then boys are blind in one eye.

只有过去男孩才会这样看待事物吗?现在呢?或许这项研究的结果反映了男孩普遍存在的一种倾向,即无论在哪个时代,除非被明确要求,否则他们倾向于画男性。然而,桑德拉·韦伯和克劳迪娅·米切尔的研究却不支持这种观点。她们研究了600多幅由小学生、实习教师和资深教师根据“画一位老师”这一主题创作的画作。几乎所有这些画作,无论男女学生,画的都是女性。针对批评者认为这种发现是研究主题本身造成的假象,韦伯和米切尔增加了新的主题,例如“画你最喜欢的老师”、“画一位理想的老师”或“画一个课堂”。就老师的形象而言,结果依然一致:“画中典型的老师……是一位白人女性,她站在黑板或课桌前,指着或讲解着。” 25正如当代教师的形象带有性别色彩一样,历史上的清教徒和定居者的形象也同样如此。我们的研究结果,连同韦伯和米切尔的研究结果,表明任何描绘自我形象的心理倾向都会被文化编码的、指向性别刻板印象的提示所压制。无论这些刻板印象源于过去还是现在,这一结论似乎都成立。

Is it only the past that boys see this way? What about the present? Perhaps the results of this investigation speak to a more generalized tendency among boys to draw males—irrespective of time period—unless explicitly prompted to do otherwise. Such a view, however, is unsupported by the work of Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell,24 who examined over 600 drawings by schoolchildren, student teachers, and experienced teachers in response to the prompt “Draw a teacher.” Nearly every one of these drawings, by male and female students alike, was of a woman. In response to critics who claimed that such findings were artifacts of the research prompt, Weber and Mitchell added new prompts such as “Draw your favorite teacher” “Draw an ideal teacher” or “Draw a class at work.” Insofar as the depiction of the teacher was concerned, the results were consistent: “The typical teacher portrayed in the drawings…was a white woman pointing or expounding, standing in front of a blackboard or desk.”25 Just as the image of the present-day teacher is gender-coded, so are the historical images of Pilgrims and Settlers. Our findings, together with those of Weber and Mitchell, suggest that any psychological tendency to draw a picture of oneself is overridden by culturally coded prompts that tap into gender stereotypes. This would seem to hold true whether stereotypes are drawn from the past or from the present.

我们如何才能平衡男孩和女孩对历史的认知?有人建议提高女性对历史贡献的重视程度。例如,我们可以庆祝妇女历史月,并在教室里张贴美国著名女性的海报——卢克丽霞·莫特、哈丽特·塔布曼、苏珊·B·安东尼、伊丽莎白·凯迪·斯坦顿和贝蒂·弗里丹。但我们对此仍持怀疑态度。事实上,在我们调查的一间教室里,这五位女性的照片确实挂满了墙壁,而且那里的布置方式与其他教室并无二致。

How might we bring balance to both girls' and boys'#x0027;s depictions of the past? One suggestion has been to increase the salience of women's contributions to history. We might, for example, celebrate Women's History Month and line classrooms with posters of famous American women—Lucretia Mott, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Betty Friedan. We remain skeptical. The fact is that pictures of these five women did line the walls of one classroom we surveyed, and the patterns there were no different from those in the other classrooms.

在教室墙上张贴杰出女性的照片,或许是出于好意,旨在平衡以男性为主导的历史课程。这类海报在历史和社会研究教科书中也有体现,近年来,这些教科书在整合美国重要女性的贡献方面取得了巨大进步。 26但仅仅因为女性占据了更多篇幅就断言教科书现在呈现了平衡的历史观,这是有问题的。正如芭芭拉·莱特及其同事所观察到的。在教科书分析中,关于女性的简短传记和摘录“通常被单独框起来,置于正文之外,强化了她们作为旁注或事后补充的观念。” 27同样,历史学家琳达·克伯尔指出,女性之所以能进入历史概览课程,仅仅是因为“她们帮助男性做他们想做的事情,无论是开拓边疆还是维持工厂运转;为了博取眼球,比如扮演女巫、妓女或二战中的女飞行员;[或者]参与到女性参政权运动中,而这场运动被认为在1919年就结束了。” 28

Lining the classroom walls with pictures of prominent women can be a well-meaning attempt to balance a male-dominated history curriculum. Such posters have a counterpart in history and social studies textbooks, which in recent years have made enormous strides in integrating the contributions of important American women.26 But it is problematic to conclude that textbooks now present a balanced view of the past because women occupy more space. As Barbara Light and her colleagues observed in their textbook analysis, short biographies and excerpts on women “commonly appear boxed off outside the main prose, reinforcing their consideration as asides or afterthoughts.”27 Likewise, the historian Linda Kerber suggests that women make it into the history survey course only “insofar as they help men do what men wish to do, whether it be settling the frontier or keeping the factories running; for shock value, as witches or prostitutes or women air service pilots in World War II; [or] in the politics of woman suffrage, which is understood to have ended in 1919”28

格尔达·勒纳将这类变化描述为“贡献史”,即讲述女性如何为男性早已视为重要的事业做出贡献的故事。 29对于教科书编辑来说,“贡献史”是一种诱人且经济高效的策略,因为他们只需在现有叙述中添加新内容即可。例如,在传统的伊桑·艾伦和拉法耶特侯爵的画像旁,他们添加了黛博拉·桑普森,她“女扮男装……在大陆军中表现出色”。 30在修订西部定居和探险章节时,编辑们用一张将女侦察员萨卡加维亚置于刘易斯和克拉克向西眺望的传统插图替换了原图。在马丁·路德·金的画像旁边,他们粘贴了罗莎·帕克斯的画像。

Gerda Lerner characterizes such changes as “contributory history” or the story of how women contributed to enterprises men already deemed important.29 Contributory history is a tempting and cost-effective strategy for textbook editors because they have only to add new material to the existing narrative. Alongside the traditional picture of Ethan Allen and the Marquis de Lafayette, they add Deborah Sampson, who “disguised as a man…served well in the Continental army.”30 When the section on western settlement and exploration is revised, editors replace the traditional illustration of Lewis and Clark peering westward with one that places Sacajawea, their woman scout, between them. Next to Martin Luther King, they paste Rosa Parks.

贡献史保留了传统教科书中常见的假设。历史仍然是政治和经济进步在公共舞台上上演的故事,它详细记载了伟人的困境和重要事迹。然而,贡献史对“进步”、“伟大”和“重要”这些概念本身以及某些人类经验领域为何比其他领域更重要的原因都未加质疑。贡献史基于这样一种观念:历史只有一个,而不是存在多个“历史”,其中许多历史因为其内容被认为无关紧要而被忽略。贡献史让我们在文献记录中苦苦搜寻一位女朗姆酒商人的踪迹,却从未想过质疑我们为何要讲述朗姆酒的故事。

Contributory history preserves the assumptions common to traditional textbooks. History remains the story of political and economic progress acted out on a public stage. It details the plight of great people and important deeds. But contributory history leaves unchallenged the terms “progress” “great” and “important” and the reasons why some spheres of human experience matter more than others. Contributory history rests on the notion that there is a single history instead of multiple “histories” many of which go untold because their content is viewed as insignificant or unimportant. Contributory history sends us to forage through the documentary record in search of a woman rum trader but never thinks to challenge why we narrate the story of rum.

我们关注学校课程改革建议,这可能会给人一种印象,即我们认为历史图像源于课堂。我们认为确实如此——部分源于课堂。但我们也意识到,这些图像受到诸多因素的影响,而不仅仅是学校的教学资源。 31 好莱坞对我们西部拓荒者形象的影响几乎肯定超过了西部历史学家的著作; 32我们对清教徒的印象更多地来自感恩节传说,而非佩里·米勒的学术史。我们的问卷要求孩子们回忆他们在学校、媒体、流行文化、教堂和家庭中遇到的图像。鉴于这些图像的丰富内涵,悬挂……制作课堂海报或重写插图说明文字似乎确实是一种软弱无力的回应。

Our focus on suggested changes in school curriculum might give the impression that we think historical images originate in the classroom. We believe they do—in part. But we also recognize that these images are influenced by many sources, not just those found in school.31 Hollywood shapes our images of Western Settlers almost certainly more than the work of historians of the West;32 our images of Pilgrims are rendered more by Thanksgiving lore than by the intellectual histories of Perry Miller. Our questionnaire asked children to conjure up images that they encounter not only in school, but in the media, in popular culture, in church, and at home. Given the depth of these images, hanging a classroom poster or rewriting an illustration's caption seems a weak response indeed.

当根深蒂固的文化假设遭到正面挑战时会发生什么?玛丽·K ·T·泰特罗接受了这一挑战,并为十一年级学生设计了一门女性历史课程。33她发现许多学生难以将他们阅读的资料与之前年级所学的“真实历史”调和起来。面对与他们先入为主的观念相悖的文本,这些学生抱怨说女性历史“充满主观意见”。这门课程“质疑了学生们认为的真相。它给他们造成了认知失调……它让他们对什么是正确的感到困惑,并且与他们一直以来所见所闻的关于社会中恰当角色和领域的认知相悖。” 34

What happens when deep cultural assumptions are confronted head-on? Mary K. T. Tetreault accepted this challenge and designed a course on women's history for eleventh graders.33 She found that many students had trouble reconciling the sources they read with the “real history” they had learned in previous grades. Confronted by texts that contradicted their preconceptions, these students complained that women's history was “opinioney” and subjective. The course “called into question what [students] thought was true. It created cognitive dissonance for them…. It confused them about what's the right way and it went against what they had always seen and heard about the proper roles and spheres of society.”34

当我们引导学生思考为什么某个群体的故事被讲述,而另一个群体的故事却被忽略时,我们便向他们提出了一系列新的认知、认识论和情感挑战。学生们认为,教科书早已做出了收录与排除的决定。但教科书究竟是如何决定哪些内容重要,哪些故事应该被讲述,哪些故事应该被掩盖的呢?传统上,我们引导学生提出这些问题的方式是,向他们提供不同的叙述、相互竞争的叙事,甚至是提供一些教科书,其中先呈现一个叙事,然后由代表不同视角的历史学家进行评述。这些活动都能有效地帮助学生认识到,过去由许多故事组成,不同的人选择将这些故事构建成不同的叙事,这些叙事在形式、语调和情感层面都各不相同。然而,即使是这些活动,也无法让学生真正接触到“行动”——即权衡各种相互冲突的重点的智力活动。在阅读他人的作品时,学生们会了解他人所做的选择,但他们仍然是认识论上的局外人,对叙事形成过程中那些艰难的选择视而不见。

When we ask students to consider why one group's story is told and another's is left out, we pose for them a new set of cognitive, epistemological and emotional challenges. Decisions of inclusion and exclusion, students believe, have already been made by the textbooks. But how do textbooks decide what is important, which stories to narrate and which to silence? Traditionally, our attempts to get students to ask these questions take the form of providing them with alternative accounts, competing narratives, or even textbooks in which a narrative is presented and then commented upon by historians who represent different perspectives. Each of these activities can be a useful gesture toward getting students to see that the past comprises many stories and that different individuals have chosen to form these stories into narratives that look different, sound different, and feel different in their underlying tropes. But even these activities leave students distant from the “real action” the intellectual work of deciding how to weigh competing emphases. In reading other's work, students learn about the choices others have made, but they remain epistemological outsiders, blind to the hard choices that characterize the formation of narrative.

仅仅让学生接触他人已经消化和诠释过往历史的不同视角是不够的。我们理解历史多元性的唯一途径,是亲身经历讲述历史的过程,是梳理过往各种相互冲突的视角,并亲手书写属于我们自己的历史故事。我们设想的历史课堂,是学生们通过重写历史来学习历史的课堂。学生们之所以能够对多元的历史叙事产生敏感度,是因为他们曾与这些叙事进行过深入的探讨,他们不是作为他人叙述的仲裁者,而是作为自己叙事的作者。这正是历史教学的愿景。它将一门学校学科从一个固定的故事(其意义和重要性问题都已预设好)转变为一系列故事,引导学生思考完整的人类经验。通过质疑过去,学生能够更好地理解当下。哪些活动——无论是过去的还是现在的——值得关注?哪些人的故事和议题被纳入或忽略?谁来决定这一切?

It is not enough to expose students to alternative visions of the past, already digested and interpreted by others. The only way we can come to understand the past's multiplicity is by the direct experience of having to tell it, of having to sort through the welter of the past's conflicting visions and produce a story written by our own hand. We have in mind here a vision of history classrooms where students learn the subject by rewriting it. Students come to develop a sensitivity to multiple stories because they have wrestled with them, not as arbiters of other's accounts but as authors of their own. This vision of history instruction transforms a school subject from a fixed story, with questions of significance and importance sewn up, to an array of stories that invites students to consider the fullness of human experience. By questioning the past, students illuminate their present. What activities—past and present—are worthy of attention? Whose stories and what issues are included or left out? Who gets to decide?

事实上,我们在为问卷选择三个历史主题时也面临着这些问题。美国历史教科书中通常会对清教徒和定居者进行大量描述,而嬉皮士却往往被忽略。例如,托德和柯蒂斯合著的《美国民族的崛起》一书,是美国最畅销的历史教科书之一,书中对清教徒的描述就体现了这一点。 35从这本书中,我们可以了解到清教徒的信仰;普通家庭的饮食;他们用来照明的灯具种类(从“贝蒂灯”到灯芯草灯);他们的穿着;以及关于权威、来世和工作在日常生活中的地位等观念,这些构成了清教徒的认知世界。的确,对于大多数学龄儿童来说,学习清教徒的历史是他们为数不多的能够了解一个时代社会历史的机会之一——了解不同时期普通人的风俗、价值观、习惯和世界观。

Indeed, we ourselves faced these questions in selecting the three historical prompts for our questionnaire. Pilgrims and Settlers typically receive abundant coverage in American history textbooks, while Hippies often go unmentioned. Consider, for example, the treatment of the Pilgrims in Todd and Curtis' Rise of the American Nation, one of the best-selling American history textbooks.35 From this book we learn what the Pilgrims believed; what ordinary families ate; the kinds of lamps they used to illuminate their houses (from “Betty Lamps” to rushlights); the clothing they wore; and the beliefs about authority, the world to come, and the place of work in everyday existence that framed the Pilgrim's conceptual universe. Indeed, for most schoolchildren the study of Pilgrims is one of the few occasions when they learn the social history of an era—the mores, values, habits, and world views of ordinary people from a different time period.

在同一本详尽讲述清教徒故事的书中,嬉皮士群体却不见踪影。尽管书中用整整一章的篇幅描写了20世纪60年代的事件(第13单元,“迈向新时代”),但我们对那个年代的青年运动的了解,仅限于反战示威活动“扰乱总统在公共仪式上的演讲”。 36孩子们被蒙在鼓里的是,这些“扰乱”行为实际上根植于人们对权威态度的更大转变之中,这种转变几乎在社会生活的各个领域都带来了深刻的变化,从藐视毒品法到反抗传统的性伦理(推翻了“清教徒”关于“同居”的观念,并公开接受“自由恋爱”);从探索东方宗教哲学到对着装和发型的更宽松的定义;从受美洲原住民信仰而非犹太教-基督教信仰影响的环境态度,到关于我们“每日面包”(无论是素食、有机食品还是长寿饮食)的新观念,嬉皮士对美国社会生活结构的影响之深远,丝毫不亚于清教徒的民俗。然而,要了解这些变化,今天的学生需要查阅托德·吉特林、斯托顿·林德、芭芭拉·爱泼斯坦等历史学家的专著。莫里斯·伊瑟曼。37手边最近的历史资料——学生的教科书——却只留下空白。

In the same book that tells us so much about Pilgrims, the group of people known as Hippies are nowhere to be found. Despite an entire chapter on the events of the 1960s (Unit 13, “Into a New Era”), we learn about the youth movement of that decade only in the context of antiwar demonstrations that “disrupted the president's speeches at public ceremonies.”36 What remains hidden from children is the notion that these “disruptions” were nested within larger shifts in attitudes toward authority that wrought profound changes in practically every sphere of social life, from flouting drug laws to rebellion against conventional sexual ethics (overturning a “Puritan” notion of “living in sin” and introducing the public embrace of “free love”); from an exploration of Eastern religious philosophies to a looser definition of appropriate dress and hair style; from attitudes about the environment guided more by Native American beliefs than Judeo-Christian ones to new ideas about our “daily bread”—whether in its vegetarian, organic, or macrobiotic form. Indeed, we could make the case that Hippies changed the fabric of American social life in ways no less profound than the folkways of the Pilgrims. To learn about these changes, however, today's students would have to search the monographic literature of historians like Todd Gitlin, Staughton Lynd, Barbara Epstein, and Maurice Isserman.37 The histories closest at hand—student's textbooks—leave only blank spaces.

这项研究提出的问题与它解答的问题一样多。后续研究可以让我们重返这些课堂,带着学生们的画作,让他们讨论画的内容和原因。这样,我们或许能够识别出学生推理中存在的具体假设。让教师参与类似的绘画任务也很有启发意义,因为教师的态度与学生的理解之间的关系远非显而易见。问卷调查研究为了获得广泛的样本,必然会牺牲一些细节。进一步的研究——专注于学生个体赋予这些画作的意义的研究——将为我们目前提出的问题增添更多层次和清晰度。

This study raises as many questions as it addresses. A follow-up study would have us return to these same classrooms, drawings in hand, and ask students to discuss what they drew and why. In this way we might be able to identify the specific assumptions present in student's reasoning. It would also be illuminating to ask teachers to engage in a parallel drawing task, for the relationship between teacher attitudes and student understanding is far from evident. Questionnaire studies necessarily sacrifice detail in favor of a broad sampling scheme. Further research—research that focuses on the meanings individual students impute to these drawings—would add texture and clarity to the questions we have begun to ask.

结论

CONCLUSION

我们运用一项相对简单的研究任务,提出了关于典型历史课程现状及其未来发展方向的问题。然而,即使是小学生绘制的图画,也能让我们窥见一些难以用语言解释的认知。我们认为,这正是毕加索所说的“艺术是一种谎言,却揭示了现实的真相”的含义所在。如果说我们的研究有什么意义,那就是:在女孩的眼中,历史上的女性形象模糊不清;在男孩的眼中,她们几乎隐形。从历史角度来看,这一发现构成了一种严重的误解。从社会角度来看,它助长了令人担忧且有害的观念。从教育角度来看,我们希望它能带来挑战。

We have used a relatively simple research task to raise questions about what the typical history curriculum is and what it could be. But pictures, even those drawn by schoolchildren, provide a window to perceptions that sometimes dodge verbal explanation. We believe this is what Picasso meant when he wrote that art is a lie that tells the truth about reality. If there is any point to our work, it is this: In girls' minds, women in history are blurry figures; in boys'#x0027;s minds, they are virtually invisible. On historical grounds, this finding constitutes a serious misrepresentation. On social grounds, it perpetuates alarming and dysfunctional attitudes. On educational grounds, it poses, we hope, a challenge.

附录:问卷中使用的教科书式段落,第二部分

APPENDIX: TEXTBOOK-LIKE PASSAGES USED IN THE QUESTIONNAIRE, PART 2

朝圣者

Pilgrims

当清教徒来到普利茅斯时,他们饱受寒冷天气、食物短缺和疾病的折磨。种植庄稼也十分困难。印第安人教会了清教徒如何施肥:将鱼与玉米种子一起埋入土中。他们还教导清教徒在田地里守候几个晚上,以防狼和其他野生动物挖走鱼。

When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth they suffered from cold weather, lack of food, and sickness. They also had a hard time growing crops to eat. The Indians taught the Pilgrims how to fertilize the soil by planting a fish in the ground with corn seeds. They also taught the Pilgrims to watch their fields for a few nights to make sure that wolves and other wild animals did not dig up the fish.

请画一幅清教徒耕种土地的图画:[方框在此]。

Please draw a picture of the Pilgrims farming the land: [a box follows].

西部定居者

Western Settlers

1844年,詹姆斯·K·波尔克当选总统。他承诺将美国的领土从大西洋扩展到太平洋。许多人他们收拾行装,乘坐篷车向西迁徙。这些西部拓荒者在旅途中面临诸多困难。他们惧怕野兽、崎岖的地形和恶劣的天气。沿途几乎没有遮荫的地方,而且这些拓荒者常常食物匮乏。

In 1844 James K. Polk was elected president. He promised to expand the territory of the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Many people packed up their belongings and moved west in covered wagons. These Western Settlers faced many difficulties in their journey. They feared wild animals, rough terrain, and harsh weather. There was little shade and often these settlers did not have much food.

请画一幅定居者乘坐篷车的图画:[方框后面是]。

Please draw a picture of Settlers riding in a covered wagon: [a box follows].

嬉皮士

Hippies

20世纪60年代,美国卷入了一场名为越南的战争。一些美国人支持这场战争,但另一些人则认为这场战争毫无意义且错误。他们在大学校园和白宫前举行抗议活动,反对这场战争。这些抗议者通常被称为嬉皮士。他们举着反战标语和印有和平标志的横幅。许多嬉皮士衣着邋遢,头戴头巾。

In the 1960s, the United States entered a war in a country called Vietnam. Some Americans supported the war but others felt it was senseless and wrong. They protested against the war at universities and in front of the White House. These protesters were often called Hippies. They carried signs against the war and banners with the peace symbol on it. Many of these hippies wore scruffy clothes and headbands.

请画一幅嬉皮士抗议的图画:[方框在此]。

Please draw a picture of the Hippies at a protest: [a box follows].

笔记

NOTES

本文最初由我与 Janice E. Fournier 合著,发表于《美国教育杂志》第 105 期(1997 年),© 1997 芝加哥大学版权所有。保留所有权利。感谢 Janice 同意我为本卷更新本文。同时感谢以下读者对早期草稿提出的宝贵意见:N. L. Gage、Miriam Hirschstein、Peter Seixas 和 Suzanne Wilson。《美国教育杂志》编辑 Phil Jackson也帮助我们完善了思路。最后,我要衷心感谢这些充满抱负的艺术家及其老师,没有他们的帮助,这项研究不可能完成。

 

This essay, which was originally co-authored with Janice E. Fournier, appeared in the American Journal of Education 105 (1997), © 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. I thank Janice for agreeing to let me update it for this volume. Thanks also go to readers who commented on earlier drafts: N. L. Gage, Miriam Hirschstein, Peter Seixas, and Suzanne Wilson. Phil Jackson, editor of the American Journal of Education, also helped us to sharpen our thinking. Finally a word of thanks goes to these aspiring artists and their teachers, without whom this study could not have been completed.

 

1. Winthrop D. Jordan、Miriam Greenblatt 和 John S. Bowes,《美国人:一个民族和一个国家的历史》伊利诺伊州埃文斯顿,1985 年)。

1. Winthrop D. Jordan, Miriam Greenblatt, and John S. Bowes, The Americans: The History of a People and a Nation (Evanston, Ill., 1985).

2.同上,第 69 页

2. Ibid., 69.

3.请参阅 Mary K. T. Tetreault 在《整合女性历史:以美国高中历史教科书为例》一文中对历史教科书中性别角色的详尽分析,该文章发表于《历史教师》 19 (1986),第 210-261 页。

3. See the exhaustive analysis of gender roles in history textbooks by Mary K. T. Tetreault in “Integrating Women's History: The Case of United States History High School Textbooks,™ History Teacher 19 (1986), 210–61”.

4. Jean Roland Martin,《重拾对话:受过教育的女性的理想》纽黑文,1985 年)。

4. Jean Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven, 1985).

5. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 《助产士的故事:玛莎·巴拉德的生平,根据她的日记,1785-1812》(纽约,1990 年)。

5. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York, 1990).

6.同上,第 40 页

6. Ibid., 40.

7. J. Carleton Bell 和 David McCollum,“美国历史中学生成就的研究”,《教育心理学杂志》 8 (1917),257–74。参见现代成就测验之父 Edward L. Thorndike的类似评论, 《教育心理学简明教程》(纽约,1923 年),274。

7. J. Carleton Bell and David McCollum, “A Study of the Attainments of Pupils in United States History,™ Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917), 257–74. See similar comments by the father of modern achievement testing, Edward L. Thorndike, Educational Psychology—Briefer Course (New York, 1923), 274.

8. Diane Ravitch 和 Chester Finn, Jr.,《我们的 17 岁青少年知道什么?关于第一次全国历史和文学评估的报告》(纽约,1987 年)。

8. Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York, 1987).

9. Nel Noddings,“社会研究与女权主义™,社会教育理论与研究20 (1992),230–41”。

9. Nel Noddings, “Social Studies and Feminism,™ Theory and Research in Social Education 20 (1992), 230–41”.

10.同上,第 231 页

10. Ibid., 231.

11.例如,参见 Donna Alvermann 和 Michelle Commeyras,“邀请多种视角:为学生讨论文本中的性别不平等创造机会”,《阅读杂志》 37 (1994),38–42;Terrie Epstein,“有时是闪耀的时刻:高中生在历史背景下的艺术创作”,发表于 1993 年 4 月在亚特兰大举行的美国教育研究协会年会;Marcy Gabella,“历史感的艺术:对形式和理解的探究”,《课程研究杂志》 27 (1995),139–63。

11. See, for example, Donna Alvermann and Michelle Commeyras, “Inviting Multiple Perspectives: Creating Opportunities for Student Talk About Gender Inequalities in Text” Journal of Reading 37 (1994), 38–42; Terrie Epstein, “Sometimes a Shining Moment: High School Student's Creations of the Arts in Historical Context” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Atlanta, April 1993; Marcy Gabella, “The Art(s) of Historical Sense: An Inquiry Into Form and Understanding” Journal of Curriculum Studies 27 (1995), 139–63.

12.参见B. Light、P. Stanton和P. Bourne,“历史教科书中的性别平等内容”,《历史与社会研究教师》25(1989),18-20;Tetreault,“整合女性历史”,210-261

12. See B. Light, P. Stanton, and P. Bourne, “Sex Equity Content in History Textbooks” History and Social Studies Teacher 25 (1989), 18–20; Tetreault, “Integrating Women's History” 210–61.

13.教科书是否亏待了女孩?”社会研究评论(1992),3-5。

13. “Do Textbooks Shortchange Girls?” Social Studies Review (1992), 3–5.

14.例如,参见 Karen Machover,《人物绘画中的人格投射》伊利诺伊州斯普林菲尔德,1949 年);Elizabeth Koppitz,《中学学生人物绘画的心理评价》(纽约,1968 年);M. Richey,“儿童绘画中‘自我’形象的质量优势”,《临床心理学杂志》 21(1965 年),59-61。

14. See, for example, Karen Machover, Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure (Springfield, Ill. 1949); Elizabeth Koppitz, Psychological Evaluation of Human Figure Drawings by Middle School Pupils (New York, 1968); M. Richey, “Qualitative Superiority of the ‘self’ Figure in Children's Drawings” Journal of Clinical Psychology 21 (1965), 59–61.

15. Richey,“‘自我’形象的优越性” 59-61

15. Richey, “Superiority of the ‘self’ Figure” 59–61.

16. Koppitz,人体素描》,第5页。

16. Koppitz, Human Figure Drawings, 5.

17.在编写教科书段落时,我们尽量遵循现有小学教科书的风格。我们参考了以下书籍:T. Helmus、V. Arnsdorf、E. Toppin 和 N. Pounds合著的世界及其人民:美国及其邻国》(新泽西州莫里斯敦,1982 年);S. Klein著的《学乐社会研究:我们国家的历史》(纽约,1981 年);J. Ralph Randolph 和 James W. Pohl合著的《美国人民:他们来自许多地方》(德克萨斯州奥斯汀,1973 年)。

17. In composing textbook passages, we tried to stick to the style of existing elementary school textbooks. We looked to these books for guidance: T. Helmus, V. Arnsdorf, E. Toppin, and N. Pounds, The World and Its People: The United States and Its Neighbors (Morristown, N.J., 1982); S. Klein, Scholastic Social Studies: Our Country's History (New York, 1981); J. Ralph Randolph and James W. Pohl, People of America: They Came from Many Lands (Austin, Tex., 1973).

18.我们使用大约 20% 的问卷测试了我们编码方案的评分者间信度,结果显示信度很高,Cohen's Kappa = .91,p < .001。

18. We tested the interrater reliability of our coding scheme using approximately 20 percent of the questionnaires, which yielded a high reliability, Cohen's Kappa = .91, p < .001.

19.卡方分析表明,这些数据按历史提示的差异具有统计学意义,x 2 ( 6, N = 80) = 40.1,p < .001。

19. A chi-square analysis showed that the differences in these data by historical prompt were statistically significant, x2 (6, N = 80) = 40.1, p < .001.

20.这些发现与 K. K. McNiff 的《儿童艺术中的性别差异》(波士顿大学博士论文,1981 年)中的发现相似

20. These findings are similar to those of K. K. McNiff, “Sex Differences in Children's Art” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1981).

21.为了进一步验证我们的分析,我们使用重复测量方差分析法分析了学生对问卷第一部分和第二部分的回答,考察了男生和女生对这两部分的回答。这需要使用二元女性/非女性编码系统记录学生的绘画作品,其中模糊的绘画作品——通常是简笔画——被编码为“非女性”)。该方差分析结果显示,性别的主效应显著,F(1,130) = 12.71,p < .0005,且性别与问卷部分(第一部分与第二部分)的交互作用也显著,F(1,130) = 4.95,p < .05,这进一步表明,问卷第一部分和第二部分提示语的差异对男生的影响相对较小,而对女生的影响则较大。

21. To further check our analysis, we analyzed student's responses to parts 1 and 2 of the questionnaire using a repeated-measures analysis of variance, examining boys'#x0027;s and girls' responses to both parts. (This entailed recording student's drawings using a binary female/nonfemale coding system in which ambiguous drawings—typically stick figures—were coded as “nonfemale”) This ANOVA yielded a significant main effect for sex, F(1,130) = 12.71, p < .0005, and a significant sex X questionnaire part (part 1 versus part 2) interaction, F(1,130) = 4.95, p < .05, further showing that the difference in prompts from part 1 to part 2 had relatively little effect on boys and more so on girls.

22. Ellen Langer,《正念》(马萨诸塞州雷丁,1989 年)

22. Ellen Langer, Mindfulness (Reading, Mass., 1989).

23.参见 Fiona Terry 在英国背景下的类似发现,“女性历史与儿童对性别的认知”,历史教学》 17 (1988),20-24。

23. See similar findings in a British context by Fiona Terry, “Women's History and Children's Perceptions of Gender” Teaching History 17 (1988), 20–24.

24. Sandra Weber 和 Claudia Mitchell,《真有趣,你看起来不像个老师》伦敦,1995 年)。

24. Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell, That's Funny, You Don't Look Like a Teacher (London, 1995).

25.同上,第28页

25. Ibid., 28.

26. Tetreault,“整合女性历史”

26. Tetreault, “Integrating Women's History.”

27. Light、Stanton 和 Bourne,“性别平等内容” 19

27. Light, Stanton, and Bourne, “Sex Equity Content” 19.

28. Linda K. Kerber,“‘意见的保证’:女性历史的挑战”历史杂志2 (1989),30–34(引自第31 页)。

28. Linda K. Kerber, “‘Opinionative Assurance’: The Challenge of Women's History” Magazine of History 2 (1989), 30–34 (quotation from p. 31).

29. Gerda Lerner,“将女性置于历史中:定义和挑战”,女权主义研究》3(1975),5-14。

29. Gerda Lerner, “Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges” Feminist Studies 3 (1975), 5–14.

30.这段引文出自美国历史教科书市场领导者之一(Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich),Lewis Paul Todd 和 Merle Curti 著,《美国民族的崛起》(佛罗里达州奥兰多,1982 年),第 131 页。

30. This quotation is from one of the market leaders in U.S. history textbooks (Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich), Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti, Rise of the American Nation (Orlando, Fla., 1982), 131.

31.例如,参见迈克尔·弗里施(Michael Frisch)的《美国历史与集体记忆的结构:经验图像学的初步实践》(“American History and the Structure of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography”),载于《美国历史杂志》(Journal of American History)第75卷(1989年),第1130-1155页;大卫·洛文塔尔(David Lowenthal )的《过去是一个异国他乡》(The Past Is a Foreign Country )(英国剑桥,1985年);乔治·利普西茨(George Lipsitz)的《时间流逝:集体记忆与美国大众文化》(Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture )(明尼阿波利斯,1993年);大卫·西兰(David Thelan)的《记忆与美国历史》(“Memory and American History”),载于《美国历史杂志》(Journal of American History )第75卷(1989年),第1117-1129页;薇薇安·索布恰克(Vivian Sobchack )的《历史的延续:电影、电视与现代事件》(The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event)(纽约,1996年)。另见詹姆斯·沃奇(James Wertsch)在《叙事与生活史杂志》(Journal of Narrative and Life History)第4卷第4期(1994年)上汇编的一系列文章,以及罗伯特·法尔(Robert Farr)在《文化与心理学》(Culture and Psychology)第4卷第1期特刊上汇编的文章。3(1998 年 9 月),“一百年的集体和社会表征”。

31. See, for example, the work of Michael Frisch, “American History and the Structure of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography” Journal of American History 75 (1989), 1130–55; David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, England, 1985); George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1993); David Thelan, “Memory and American History” Journal of American History 75 (1989), 1117–29; Vivian Sobchack, The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York, 1996). See, as well, the series of articles assembled by James Wertsch in the Journal of Narrative and Life History 4, no. 4 (1994), as well as those assembled by Robert Farr in a special issue of Culture and Psychology 4, no. 3 (September 1998), “One Hundred Years of Collective and Social Representations.”

32.参见彼得·塞克斯的大胆原创作品,他对比了青少年对《搜索者》与狼共舞》的反应。彼得·塞克斯,“流行电影与年轻人对美洲原住民与白人关系史的理解”,《历史教师》26(1993),351-69。

32. See the boldly original work of Peter Seixas, who contrasted adolescent's responses to The Searchers and Dances with Wolves. Peter Seixas, “Popular Film and Young People's Understanding of the History of Native American-White Relations” History Teacher 26 (1993), 351–69.

33. Mary K. T. Tetreault,“这太主观了”教育杂志168 (1986),78-95。

33. Mary K. T. Tetreault, “It's So Opinioney” Journal of Education 168 (1986), 78–95.

34.同上,第 81-82 页

34. Ibid., 81–82.

35. Todd 和 Curti,美国民族的崛起》

35. Todd and Curti, Rise of the American Nation.

36.同上,762

36. Ibid., 762.

37. Todd Gitlin,《六十年代:希望的岁月,愤怒的日子》纽约,1981 年);Staughton Lynd,《美国激进主义的知识起源》(纽约,1968 年);Barbara Epstein,《政治抗议与文化革命:20 世纪 70 年代和 80 年代的非暴力直接行动》(伯克利,1993 年);Maurice Isserman,《如果我有一把锤子:旧左派的消亡和新左派的诞生》(纽约,1987 年)。

37. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1981); Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York, 1968); Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley, 1993); Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York, 1987).

III

教师面临的挑战

CHALLENGES FOR THE TEACHER

6

6

从不同视角审视历史

Peering at History Through Different Lenses

学科视角在历史教学中的作用

The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in Teaching History

与苏珊娜·M·威尔逊

With Suzanne M. Wilson

四位新教师坐下来合作规划一个关于大萧条的单元。我们加入他们的讨论时,他们正在进行中:

 

Four novice teachers sit down to collaborate on planning a unit on the Great Depression. We join them in the middle of their discussion:

 

简:我们真的要让孩子们明白,大萧条不仅仅是1929年的股市崩盘。它对所有美国人的生活都产生了深远的影响。不如让他们读读《愤怒的葡萄》的部分章节,甚至可以看看兰格拍摄的一些移民工人的照片。

Jane: We really have to convey to the kids that the Depression wasn't just 1929 and the stock market crash. It had a profound impact on the lives of all Americans. Let's have them read parts of The Grapes of Wrath, maybe even look at some of Lange's photographs of migrant workers.

凯茜:读斯坦贝克的作品很棒!如果他们不了解土地的影响——你知道,沙尘暴和干旱——他们就会错过重点。

Cathy: Reading Steinbeck is great! If they don't understand the impact of the land—you know, the dust storms and the droughts—they'll miss the main point.

比尔:重点是什么?等等。三十年代的经济和政治问题即便不比沙尘暴更重要,也至少与之同等重要。股市崩盘、融资融券、罗斯福的经济改革——如果不强调资本主义,你怎么能去教授大萧条呢?

Bill: The main point? Now wait just a second. The economic and political issues of the thirties were just as important, if not more so, than the Dust Bowl. The stock market crash, buying on margin, FDR's economic reforms—how can you even think about teaching the Depression without emphasizing capitalism?

弗雷德:抱歉各位,你们都搞错了重点。这些事跟孩子们的生活有什么关系?如果孩子们看不到大萧条对他们生活的影响,那这场大萧条又有什么意义呢?关联性——这才是关键!

 

Fred: Sorry, folks, but you're all missing the point. How does this stuff relate to the lives of the kids? What difference does the Depression make if the kids can't see how it affected their lives? Relevance—that's the key!

 

凯茜、比尔、简和弗雷德四位新晋教师,他们毕业于同一教师教育项目,获得了教育学硕士学位和中学社会研究教师资格证书。如今,他们都在旧金山湾区的不同高中任教。虽然他们不太可能在同一所学校共事,但他们未来与同事进行类似上述的教学计划讨论并非不可能。

Cathy, Bill, Jane, and Fred1 are four new teachers who graduated from the same teacher education program, from which they received a master's degree in education and secondary school teaching certificates in social studies. Today, all teach social studies at different high schools in the San Francisco Bay area. Although it is unlikely that they will ever teach together on the same faculty, it is not inconceivable that they will participate in planning conversations with their colleagues similar to the one above.

这段虚构的对话凸显了这些老师对历史教学截然不同的看法。考虑到他们的学术背景,这并不令人意外。凯西拥有人类学学士学位,主修考古学。弗雷德主修国际关系和政治学。比尔拥有美国研究学士学位。四人之中,只有简拥有美国历史学士学位。

This fictionalized conversation highlights the fact that these teachers think differently—very differently—about teaching history. Given their academic backgrounds, this comes as no surprise. Cathy holds a B.A. in anthropology with an emphasis in archeology. Fred majored in international relations and political science. Bill has a B.A. in American Studies. Of the four, only Jane holds a bachelor's degree in American history.

他们的背景并非特殊。社会研究教师群体通常来自人文和社会科学的各个学科。除了教授美国和欧洲历史等标准课程外,社会研究教师还需教授从人类学、经济学到性教育和家庭生活等各种课程。一旦获得教师资格证,这些教师就可能被要求教授社会研究课程中的任何课程。但是,当一位人类学专业的学生开始教授美国历史时,究竟会发生什么?或者一位欧洲历史专业的学生开始教授社会学时,又会发生什么?这四位新手教师是否做好了教授社会研究范畴内各种课程的准备?

Their backgrounds are not atypical. As a group, social studies teachers are recruited from the many disciplines that make up the humanities and social sciences. In addition to teaching standard courses in American and European history, social studies teachers are called on to teach anything from anthropology and economics to sex education and family living. Once they receive their teaching credentials, these teachers may be asked to teach any course in the social studies curriculum. But what happens, exactly, when an anthropology major sets out to teach American history? Or a European history major begins teaching sociology? How prepared are our four novices to teach the assortment of courses housed under the rubric of social studies?

我和苏珊娜·威尔逊采访并观察了六位社会研究新手教师,其中四位将作为本章的例证。在观察他们学习教学的过程中,我们很快发现,他们的学科背景对他们的教学决策有着显著且往往是决定性的影响。²本文的讨论重点是学科视角对美国历史教学的影响。我们选择美国历史作为研究对象有两个原因。首先,它是许多社会研究系的支柱学科,而且在大多数州,法律规定必须教授美国历史。其次,我们研究的四位教师中有三位在实习或入职第一年就教授过美国历史课程。只有主修人类学的凯西还没有教过历史课,但对她来说,教历史课也指日可待了。

Suzanne Wilson and I interviewed and observed a half-dozen novice social studies teachers, among them the four who serve as the illustrative examples for this chapter. As we watched these people learn to teach, it became apparent to us early on that their disciplinary backgrounds wielded a strong—and often decisive—influence on their instructional decision making.2 Our discussion here focuses on the influence of disciplinary perspectives on the teaching of American history. Two factors guided our selection of American history. First, it is the mainstay of many social studies departments, and in most states its teaching is mandated by law. Second, three of our four teachers taught classes in American history during their internships or first year on the job. Only Cathy, the anthropology major, had yet to teach a history course, and even for her the prospect of doing so was not far off.

当我们思考那些刚刚完成本科和教师培训的初级人类学家、历史学家和政治学家如何看待历史时,会发现一些问题。本文将探讨这些问题,并讨论我们在观察四位新手教师各自课堂教学时发现的一些教学风格差异。最后,我们将讨论我们的观察结果对教师教育和教学研究的一些启示。

Several issues arise when one reflects on how budding anthropologists, historians, and political scientists, fresh from their undergraduate and teacher training, think about history. We will explore those issues here, and also discuss some of the differences in teaching styles we observed while watching our four novices in their respective classrooms. Finally, we discuss some of the implications of our observations for teacher education and research on teaching.

历史观念

CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY

我们围绕凯茜、弗雷德、简和比尔四人对历史的不同理解,从历史教学中几个重要的维度展开讨论。这些维度包括事实知识的作用、诠释的地位、时间顺序和连续性的重要性,以及因果关系的意义。我们将逐一探讨这些维度。

We have organized our discussion of the differences in the conceptions of history held by Cathy, Fred, Jane, and Bill along some of the dimensions that figure prominently in the teaching of history. These dimensions include the role of factual knowledge, the place of interpretation, the significance of chronology and continuity, and the meaning of causation. We discuss each of these dimensions in turn.

事实的作用

The Role of Fact

对于政治学家弗雷德来说,历史和事实是同义词:

For Fred, the political scientist, history and fact were synonymous:

我认为了解历史就是了解……事实,了解所有日期。了解所有术语,比如维也纳会议是什么时候召开的,或者二战期间达成的协议条款是什么。

I think knowing history is knowing…the facts, all the dates. Knowing all the terms, knowing when the conference in Vienna was held or what were the terms of the agreement in World War II.

弗雷德承认自己“对历史不感兴趣”。他更喜欢国际关系和政治学,因为他认为这些学科比历史更“概括”和“专题性”。在弗雷德看来,历史只关注具体细节:“如果我学历史,我就会知道更多细节。”

Fred admitted being “no fan of history.” He preferred international relations and political science because he saw these disciplines as more “general” and “thematic” than history. In Fred's mind history dealt only with the particular: “If I were in history, I would know a lot more specifics.”

比尔主修美国研究,他认为事实是历史的基础。他用“建筑”作比喻,将历史比作一座“历史大厦”,它建立在事实信息的基础之上。然而,这座大厦的框架则由对这些具体事实的不同解读构成,也就是看待事实的“不同视角”。比尔还很快指出,传统历史中缺失了许多事实,他区分了教科书式的历史(或者他所谓的“精英历史”)和普通民众的历史。比尔意识到,许多历史著作都聚焦于伟大白人男性的故事,因此他谨慎地指出,历史也关乎其他文化、宗教、社会和种族群体的生活和经历。

Bill, an American Studies major, spoke of facts as the basis of history. He drew an analogy to a “building” a “historical edifice” built on a foundation of factual information. The building's frame, however, consisted of alternative interpretations of those specifics, “alternative ways of looking” at facts. Bill was also quick to note that many facts were missing from traditional history, and he distinguished between textbook history (or what he called “elitist history”) and the history of common people. Aware that much of historical writing has focused on the story of great white men, Bill was careful to acknowledge that history is also about the lives and experiences of other cultural, religious, social, and ethnic groups.

对弗雷德来说,历史就是事实;对比尔来说,历史超越了事实。尽管他们对历史的看法不同,但在对待事实的态度上,弗雷德和比尔却不谋而合:事实都是错误的。两位老师都试图摒弃事实。他们在课堂上迅速转移话题,不再关注具体细节,而是强调对这些细节的解读。比尔曾解释过一些教师在讲授创建国家复兴署(NRA)和农业调整署(AAA)的立法时的做法,这些机构正是新政时期一系列机构的“字母汤”:

For Fred, history is fact; for Bill, history is greater than fact. Although their beliefs about history differed, Fred and Bill were of like mind when it came to facts: They were bad. Both teachers tried to dispense with facts quickly in their classrooms, shifting the spotlight from the specifics and highlighting the interpretation of those specifics. At one point, Bill explained what some teachers did when they taught about the legislation creating the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the “alphabet soup” of the New Deal:

我一直觉得孩子们讨厌美国历史的原因是老师让他们学一些死记硬背的东西。老师会给他们布置考试,然后给他们十组字母,让他们“解释这些字母代表什么,以及每个字母的重要性”。我觉得孩子们会想:“呸!这些都不重要!”他们说得对,因为这些死记硬背的东西确实不重要!

I have this conception that the reason why kids hate U.S. history is because teachers make them learn stuff like facts. They give them a test and they give them ten sets of letters and say, “Explain what the letters stand for and the importance of each.” I think kids just go, “Blah! None of this is important!” And they are right because the facts aren't important!

简是我们学校唯一的历史系学生,她对待事实的态度比较温和。对她来说,事实构成了历史的叙事,构成了过去的故事:

Jane, our only history major, treated facts more kindly. For her, facts formed the narrative of history, the story of the past:

历史并非一堆僵化的事实罗列,这种说法虽然不受欢迎,但却是历史的生动写照。历史是事件、人物、动机以及曲折变化交织的展开过程。它丰富多彩,充满活力

History is not a stagnant set of lists of facts, the great unpopular characterization. History is an unfolding of events and people and motivation and twists and turns. It has a great deal of texture, and it lives.

对简而言,历史构成了一幅由经典问题和主题、伟人伟女、地理环境和自然灾害交织而成的丰富多彩的“画卷”。此外,历史与背景密不可分:“作为一名历史学家,我接受的训练是将历史与背景联系起来思考……我观察事物,回溯过去,探寻其根源。”在简看来,事实是历史的一部分,它们由主题和问题交织而成,而最重要的是,它们嵌入于赋予其意义和视角的背景之中。

For Jane, history forms a rich “tapestry” of classic questions and themes, great men and women, geography and natural disasters. Moreover, history is bound up with context: “As a historian, I'm trained to think of things historically as contextual…. I see things, I look back in the past, I see what the roots are.” Facts, to Jane, are part of history, woven together by themes and questions, and, most important, embedded in a context that lends meaning and perspective.

解释与证据

Interpretation and Evidence

我们的老师们对诠释的理解以及证据在诠释中的作用也存在差异。对于主修人类学的凯西来说,诠释和证据是密不可分的;理解和诠释过去首先意味着寻找考古证据。这包括挖掘、测定年代和拼凑文物:

Our teachers also differed in their understanding of interpretation and the role of evidence in formulating interpretations. For Cathy, the anthropology major, interpretation and evidence were fused; understanding and interpreting the past involved, above all, a search for archeological evidence. This entailed the excavation, dating, and piecing together of artifacts:

我喜欢发掘那些被埋藏的物品……我喜欢探究人们不为人知的一面。如今,研究一个人,你必须与他们互动。当然,他们留下了文物,但你关注的是这些人现在在做什么,他们现在是如何互动的。你更多地参与到当下……我喜欢过去发生的事情。

I like finding the objects that have been buried…. I like dealing with the hidden side of people. If you study someone nowadays, you have to interact with them. Sure, they have artifacts, but you are focusing on what these people are doing now, how they are interacting now. You are more involved in the present day…. I like what happened before.

“过去发生的事”无法在书中找到。对凯茜来说,过去可以被挖掘出来,触摸到,握在手中。凯西教九年级的学生如何进行解释,她努力引导他们紧贴证据,因为她认为,只有当假设聚焦于可以确定无疑的事物时,才能最有成效。那些偏离现有实物证据的理论和解释令她感到困惑。

What “happened before” is not to be found in a book. Rather, for Cathy, the past can be unearthed, touched, held in her hand. When Cathy taught her ninth graders about interpretation, she tried to get them to stick close to the evidence, for she believed that hypotheses were most productive when they focused on things that could be known with certainty. Theories and interpretations that strayed far from the available physical evidence baffled her.

凯茜的诠释观念与简的截然不同。对简而言,诠释远不止于现有证据的总和。诠释与史学编纂、历史学家的研究过程和方法紧密相连:“历史的创造,历史学家的工作,需要对论证和逻辑、对证据、以及如何理性地细致分析等问题进行非常清晰的思考。”她将史学编纂描述为分析与综合:

Cathy's notion of interpretation stands in stark contrast to Jane's. For Jane, interpretation went far beyond the sum of the available evidence. Interpretation was bound up with historiography, the processes and modes of inquiry of historians: “The making of history, the task of being a historian, involves very clear thinking about argument and logic, about evidence, about how to split hairs sensibly.” She described historiography as analysis and synthesis:

历史的分析性体现在对事物的拆解和综合分析上。历史写作的过程本身就是一种综合性的思考。你需要将事物拆解开来,然后再重新组合。你需要寻找其中的联系,关注具体细节,收集证据,并提出一般性的假设。所有这些步骤都体现了一种科学精神。

History is analytical in the sense that you go and break things down. It's synthetic when you engage in the process of writing history. You take things apart and then you put them back together. You try to look for connections. You look for specifics, gather evidence, make general hypotheses. You go through all those steps in a sort of scientific spirit.

对简而言,历史诠释围绕着“历史上的经典问题”展开,这些问题将事实信息编织成一个复杂而丰富的故事。历史既是叙事,也是诠释。它既展现了过去的产物,也展现了历史学家重构历史的过程。

Interpretation for Jane revolved around the “classic questions in history” questions that wove factual information into a complex and rich story. History was narrative and interpretation. It represented the products of the past as well as the processes of the historians engaged in reconstructing it.

弗雷德也认识到解释在社会科学中的重要性,但对他来说,解释是政治学家的职责,而不是历史学家的职责:

Fred also recognized the importance of interpretation in social science, but for him interpretation was the purview of political scientists, not historians:

我认为历史就是对已发生事件的基本事实的记录。它记录了究竟发生了什么,而不是它是如何发生的。你只需要问:“发生了什么事?”历史作为背景资料非常有用。政治学则不同,它虽然也需要历史,但它对历史的运用更为深入。它不仅关注历史事实,更会探究事件背后的深层原因。

I think history is the basic facts of what happened. What did happen. You don't ask how it happened. You just ask, “What are the events?” History is great as background material. Political science is different because it may need history but it takes history much further. It takes history and sees what kinds of causes were behind the event, not just the facts.

政治学中的诠释往往聚焦于政治和经济问题;因此,弗雷德的诠释能力也仅限于与历史的这些维度相关的诠释。比尔同样精通政治和经济诠释,当他谈到诠释时,他的解释中常常夹杂着“左派”和“右派”之类的术语。然而,他将诠释置于历史学家的范畴之内,并承认存在其他与他自身不同的诠释。例如,他认识到……比尔深知社会问题的重要性,并坦言自己对此知之甚少。正因为意识到自身的盲点,他才利用备课时间学习各种不同的解读方式,尤其是那些融入社会史视角的解读。

Interpretation in political science often focuses on questions of politics and economics; hence, Fred's interpretive repertoire was limited to interpretations concerning these dimensions of history. Bill, too, knew a lot about political and economic interpretations, and when he spoke about interpretation his explanations were sprinkled with terms like “the Left” and “the Right.” However, he placed interpretation within the realm of the historian and acknowledged that other interpretations, divergent from his own, were possible. For example, he recognized the importance of social questions and readily admitted that he knew little about them. Because Bill recognized his blind spots, he used his preparation time to learn more about alternative interpretations, especially ones that incorporated aspects of social history.

时间顺序与连续性

Chronology and Continuity

这四位老师对时间顺序和历史连贯性的重视程度也各不相同。对凯西来说,历史就是时间顺序。当被问及她会如何从历史的角度讲授九年级的世界研究课程时,她说道:“历史学家会从一个国家刚建立的时候讲起,然后讲它是如何发展壮大的。这完全是一个时间问题。 ” 由于缺乏历史背景知识,凯西常常无法透过课本上罗列的日期和事件,窥见历史的脉络,无法理解那些塑造历史进程的个体。例如,在教授中国历史时,她感觉自己像个奴隶主,无情地逼着学生们读完课本上关于中国朝代的二十页内容:“你知道,孩子们读起来很吃力,所以我必须谨慎处理,我必须先做一些有趣的事情来平衡一下——他们中的一些人觉得(历史)是这一章里最枯燥的部分。”凯茜认为历史主要是一连串无休止的事件,这些事件往往是孤立的,与当代社会关系不大,因此她看不到历史的连续性和变化。

These four teachers also differed in the emphasis they placed on chronology and continuity. For Cathy, history was chronology. When asked how she would present her ninth-grade world studies curriculum from a historical perspective, she remarked, “The historian would start with that country when it was just a little kid and how it has grown. It would be a time thing.” Lacking knowledge of historical context, Cathy was often unable to see beyond the parade of dates and events in her textbook to catch a glimpse of the story of history, of individuals acting and shaping the course of their affairs. When teaching about China, for instance, she felt like a slave driver mercilessly pushing her students through twenty pages in the textbook on the Chinese dynasties: “The kids, you know, fight their way through it, so I have to approach it carefully, I have to set up some sort of balance doing something interesting before—some of them think that [history] is the driest part of the chapter.” Viewing history, largely, as an endless string of events, often discrete and bearing little on contemporary society, Cathy could see in it little continuity or change.

比尔和简对时间顺序的理解更为丰富。对他们而言,时间顺序与历史的延续性密不可分。时间顺序并非仅仅是零散的日期——日期之间是由各种趋势、主题、模式和视角串联起来的。虽然比尔和简能够讲述一段历史时期的故事,提及重要的人物、日期和事件,但时间顺序并非他们解释的唯一依据。相反,每位教师都拥有一套丰富的解释性主题和概念,以此来理解过去。对比尔而言,这些主题主要涉及政治和经济。例如,在谈到罗斯福新政与美国历史上其他时期之间的联系时,他会谈到自由放任资本主义的发展以及从农业经济向工业经济的缓慢转型。他还将罗斯福新政与20世纪60年代林登·约翰逊的“伟大社会”计划以及里根政府联系起来。简的兴趣则更多地集中在过去的社会和艺术层面,她关注的是文化趋势。当被问及她对大萧条时期了解多少时,简首先转向一组幻灯片。每张幻灯片都展示了一件艺术品,一幅画作或一张照片。她利用这些幻灯片,追踪了国民心态的变迁,揭示了艺术如何反映政治和社会趋势,例如女性角色的转变或少数群体持续遭受的压迫。她这样阐述时间顺序:

Bill and Jane had richer conceptions of chronology. For these teachers, chronology and continuity were interwoven. Chronology was more than discrete dates—dates were held together by trends and themes, patterns and perspectives. While Bill and Jane could recount the story of a historical period, making reference to important people, dates, and events, chronology was not the only factor that structured their explanations. Rather, each teacher possessed a rich set of explanatory themes and concepts on which they drew to make sense of the past. For Bill, themes were largely political and economic. When talking about the connections between the New Deal and other periods in American history, for example, he spoke of the development of laissez-faire capitalism and the slow transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy. He drew connections to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s and the Reagan administration. Jane, whose interests lay more in the social and artistic aspects of the past, focused on cultural trends. When asked to explain what she knew of the Depression era, Jane turned first to a set of slides, each depicting a piece of artwork, a painting, or a photograph. Using these slides, she tracked changes in the national mind-set, showing how art mirrors political and social trends such as the changing role of women or the continued oppression of minorities. She spoke of chronology thus:

我认为历史是一个不断展开的故事,它对于你建立自我认知以及你在时间、历史中的位置至关重要。它是一种自然而然、没有丝毫刻意安排的编年史,却提供了一个绝妙的框架,让你得以审视自身在宇宙中的位置,以及过往的事物。

I see history as a story unfolding that is important in your acquisition of a sense of yourself and your place in time, your place in history. A sense of chronology unfolding without any terrifically measured gait. But a wonderful sort of framework for seeing yourself in the universe and seeing things in the past.

值得注意的是,简并不把时间顺序等同于时间(它不像凯茜对时间顺序的简单理解那样,具有以年为单位的“有节奏的步伐”)。对简和比尔来说,时间顺序是连续性的基础——它连接着现在与过去,并用简的话说,“向前迈向未来”。

Note that Jane does not equate chronology with time (it does not have the “measured gait” of years that underlies Cathy's simpler conception of chronology). Chronology, for both Jane and Bill, underlies continuity—the way in which the present connects to the past and moves, in Jane's words, “forward into the future.”

因果关系

CAUSATION

“对历史学家而言,发现发生了什么和发现为什么会发生之间没有区别,”罗宾·科林伍德曾这样说过。³原因问题是历史探究的核心,在我们四位老师的课堂上都占据了重要地位,但原因问题的含义却因讲台上的老师而异。例如,在凯西的指导下,原因并非是需要无休止地在各种相互矛盾的解释中反复思考的问题。通过探究土地、气候和人类发展之间的相互关系,可以权威地确定原因。在她教授的关于日本的单元概述中,凯西的观点听起来像是一个环境决定论者,她认为地理在塑造人类事务中起着主导作用:

“For the historian there is no difference between discovering what happened and discovering why it happened,” Robin Collingwood once remarked.3 The question of cause lies at the heart of historical inquiry, and it figured prominently in the classrooms of our four teachers, but the question of cause took on drastically different meanings depending on who was behind the lectern. For instance, with Cathy at the helm, cause was not something to be endlessly pondered over in some kind of pageant of conflicting interpretations. Cause could be determined authoritatively by probing the interrelationships among the land, the climate, and human development. In the following overview of a unit she taught on Japan, Cathy sounds like an environmental determinist, awarding geography the leading role in shaping human affairs:

我们先从地理入手,研究了日本的地理位置、气候以及地质情况。然后,我们进一步探讨了地质和地理如何影响当地居民的生活。例如,日本面临土地资源匮乏的问题,人口密度高,这会如何影响他们的生活方式?这直接影响了他们的生计;自然资源匮乏,他们又是如何应对的呢?他们选择与其他国家进行贸易。他们的贸易额有多大?例如,日本是与美国贸易额最高的国家之一。这是为什么呢?原因就在于日本的气候和地理环境。

We started out with geography, looked at the geography of Japan, where it was located, what the climate was. What the geology of the region was like and from that we went on, how does [geology and geography] influence the people who live there. Well, there is a problem with not enough land, a lot of people on a small island, how does that affect the way they lead their life? It affects their livelihood; they don't have enough natural resources, so what do they do about it? They go and trade with other countries. How much do they trade? Well, they're one of the nations leading in trade with the U.S., for example. Why's that? Because of the climate and geography.

凯茜对人类事务的理解带有她本科阶段在体质人类学和考古学方面接受的训练的鲜明印记。她最喜欢的课程都与土地有关:田野调查课,她在课上挖掘、绘制地图并确定文物的年代;博物馆课程,她在课上学习如何展示出土文物;以及生态人类学课程,这些课程让她关注智人在复杂生态系统中的地位。凯西对社会生活的理解也受到她所缺乏的训练的影响:她没有学习过经济学或政治学,历史课上也只上过一门古埃及史。由于她很少接受“模糊性”社会科学方面的训练,凯西对社会领域因果关系的理解并没有像诠释史学家那样,受到一系列限定条件的约束。在教授日本历史时,凯西缺乏对日本文化和历史的了解,而这些知识或许可以缓和她关于日本现代化的“自然资源不足,因此……”的论调。凯西对历史背景问题知之甚少,她对变革的解释充斥着从人类学中摘取的泛泛之谈,并直接套用到特定国家。她眼中的历史仅仅是时间顺序,或者如她所说,仅仅是“时间问题”。历史作为故事,作为人类主体基于动机和激情而行动并影响人类事件进程的叙事,并不在凯西的认知或教学范畴之内。

Cathy's understanding of human affairs bears the stamp of her undergraduate training in physical anthropology and archeology. Her favorite classes all dealt with the land: field courses in which she excavated, plotted, and dated artifacts; museum courses in which she learned how to display objects that had been unearthed; and courses in ecological anthropology that focused her attention on the place of Homo sapiens in a complex ecosystem. Cathy's understanding of social life was also influenced by the type of training she didn't have: She had no courses in economics or political science and but a single course, Ancient Egypt, in history. Because she received little training in the “fuzzier” social sciences, Cathy's notions of causation in the social sphere were not marked by the strings of qualifications that characterize the explanations of, say, the interpretive historian. Teaching about Japan, Cathy lacked the historical knowledge of Japanese culture and history that might have tempered her “not enough natural resources, therefore…” account of Japanese modernization. Largely unfamiliar with issues of historical context, Cathy offered explanations of change studded with generic ideas lifted from anthropology and applied directly to specific countries. When she thought of history, she thought only of chronology, or, as she put it, a “time thing.” History as story, as a narrative of human agents who acted on motives and passions and so influenced the course of human events, was not part of Cathy's intellectual or instructional repertoire.

简和比尔对因果关系的理解与凯茜截然不同。当被问及大萧条的起因时,比尔回答说:“当然,原因绝非单一”​​,并列举了导致1929年金融恐慌的诸多事件。与比尔一样,简也认为那段时期过于复杂,无法用股市崩盘之类的单一事件,甚至一系列独立事件来解释:“历史并非线性发展。并非一个伟大的白人男性做出一个又一个决定,砰砰砰。其中充满了各种各样的奇特之处,最终会呈现出丰富多彩的故事。”对简和比尔来说,因果关系是一个“棘手”的问题。单一事件的发生有很多原因,而这些原因并非都能通过挖掘泥土来发现。一些因果解释依赖于人类动机和心理学理论;另一些则借鉴了社会学和经济学理论;还有一些则运用了诸如“美国思维模式”之类的模糊概念。对比尔和简而言,原因远不止饥荒和干旱。因果关系成为一个需要思考、研究、争论和倡导的问题,但永远无法被确切地知道。

Jane's and Bill's conceptions of causation differed radically from Cathy's. When asked to discuss the causes of the Depression, Bill responded, “Well, of course, there is never just one cause” and went on to list the myriad events that contributed to the financial panic of 1929. Like Bill, Jane believed that the period was too complicated to be accounted for by a single event like the stock market crash, or even by a string of independent events: “History is not a linear progression. A great white man making decisions bang, bang, bang. There are all kinds of quirks and a rich narrative that can emerge.” Causation to Jane and Bill was a “messy” issue. Single events occur for many reasons, and these reasons are not all discovered by digging up earth. Some causal explanations rely on theories of human motivation and psychology; others draw on sociological and economic theories; still others make use of wooly constructs like the “American mind-set.” For Bill and Jane, cause extended far beyond famines and droughts. Causation became a problem to be pondered, studied, argued, and advocated, but never to be known with certainty.

历史重演

HISTORY ENACTED

在我们四位老师的课堂上,历史的意义和作用各不相同。在凯西的社会研究课堂上,历史最显著的特点就是它的缺失。她向九年级学生介绍的国家似乎存在于时间真空之中,与过去脱离了语境,仅仅机械地遵循一套通用的地理和地质规律。然而,当这些通用规律应用于具体案例时,必然只能部分正确——而且几乎可以肯定的是,在某些方面是错误的凯西缺乏相关的背景知识,常常导致她无法发现其中的错误,例如在她教授中国单元时就出现了这种情况。

History carried different meanings and functioned in different ways in the classrooms of our four teachers. In Cathy's social studies classroom, history was most frequently distinguished by its absence. The countries she presented to her ninth graders seemed to exist in a temporal vacuum, decontextualized in relation to the past and responding lockstep to a generic set of geographical and geological imperatives. The generic, when applied to a specific case, is bound to be only partly correct—and in places will almost certainly be incorrect. Cathy's lack of contextual knowledge often prevented her from detecting inaccuracies, as was the case with a unit she taught on China.

单元开始时,凯西让学生们列出一个国家因人口过剩而面临的问题。很快,黑板上就写满了各种各样的问题,从粮食短缺到住房不足,不一而足。当一个学生提出人口过剩会影响国内交通时,另一个学生举手问道:“如果人们都饿死了,政府还会花钱修路吗?”凯西对中国在极度贫困的情况下仍坚持发展核武器一无所知,也对埃塞俄比亚在遭受骇人饥荒的同时,仍斥资两亿美元庆祝马克思主义政变周年一事毫不知情,因此她才会把政府描绘成永远以公民利益为先的机构。

At the beginning of the unit, Cathy asked her students to generate a list of the problems that a country would face as a result of overpopulation. Soon the blackboard was covered with a list ranging from a lack of food to a shortage of housing. When one student suggested that overpopulation would impair domestic transportation, another student raised her hand and asked why. Cathy turned to her students and asked rhetorically, “Will the government spend money on roads if people are dying from starvation?” Unencumbered by knowledge of China's pursuit of nuclear weapons development amid abject poverty, and unaware, say, of the $200 million anniversary celebration of the Marxist coup in Ethiopia, held while a famine of ghastly proportions enveloped that country, Cathy could portray governments as institutions that always acted in the best interests of their citizens.

尽管弗雷德的美国历史课上并非没有历史,但历史的丰富性和复杂性却被忽视了。弗雷德的每一节课都以热烈地讨论当日新闻头条开始。二十分钟后,他几乎是恋恋不舍地结束讨论,开始当天的主要活动。课堂上,他的发言充斥着政治学的概念。政治和经济的解读占据主导,事实信息被弱化,历史的社会和文化层面也鲜少提及。在为期两周的工业革命单元中,弗雷德着重讲解了美国经济体系的变革,特别是从家庭手工业向工厂的过渡。不出所料,他还讨论了“强盗大亨”及其金融帝国——“垄断”、“托拉斯”和“自由放任”等词汇频频出现。然而,与金融和工业变革相伴而生的社会变迁却被他避而不谈。

Although history was not absent from Fred's U.S. history class, its richness and complexity were uncelebrated. Each period of Fred's class started with a lively discussion of the day's headlines. Almost reluctantly, he stopped this conversation after 20 minutes to begin the day's main activities. During class, his comments were peppered with concepts drawn from political science. Political and economic interpretations were showcased, factual information deemphasized, and social and cultural dimensions of history rarely mentioned. During a two-week unit on the Industrial Revolution, Fred dwelled on changes in the American economic system, especially the transition from cottage industries to factories. Not surprisingly, he also discussed the Robber Barons and their financial empires—“monopoly,” “trusts,” and “laissez-faire” were frequently heard. The social changes that paralleled the financial and industrial shifts went unmentioned.

在弗雷德的笔下,工业革命成了所有革命——无论是政治革命还是经济革命——的代表。他将美国革命和法国革命与美国内战以及当时中美洲的动荡联系起来,从而跨越数个世纪进行了广泛的比较。由于缺乏对这些事件差异远大于相似之处的背景因素的了解,弗雷德将所有革命都视为近亲。弗雷德既缺乏广博的历史知识,又缺乏对历史背景的理解,因此,和凯茜一样,他对自己的论述中的诸多错误视而不见。

In Fred's hands, the Industrial Revolution became representative of all revolutions, political and economic, and Fred drew sweeping comparisons across centuries by linking the American and French revolutions to the Civil War and to contemporary upheavals in Central America. Lacking knowledge of the contextual factors that make these events more different than similar, Fred presented all revolutions as close cousins. Possessing neither a wide knowledge of history nor an appreciation for context, Fred, like Cathy, was mostly blind to the inaccuracies he presented.

表面上看,比尔的美国历史课和弗雷德的课很像。他的课不仅以讨论时事新闻开场,而且讲课内容也大量涉及政治和经济史。然而,仔细观察就会发现,两者之间存在着显著差异。在讲授大萧条和罗斯福新政的单元时,比尔像大多数历史老师一样,进行了一系列小型讲座。不过,他的讲座辅以其他活动。其中一节课,学生们分组进行一项名为“你是总统”的活动。学生们面对一系列问题,包括失业、银行倒闭、营养不良和农场止赎,并提出解决方案和可能的行动方案。比尔利用这项活动为接下来关于富兰克林·罗斯福面临的问题以及为解决这些问题而提出的立法提案的讲座做了铺垫。另一天,比尔利用农业安全管理局摄影师拍摄的照片,引发了关于农民困境的讨论。还有一节课,他复印了《愤怒的葡萄》的部分章节,让学生们朗读。比尔通过向学生们介绍社会和文化视角,力图平衡自己在政治和经济史方面的优势。

On the surface, Bill's U.S. history class looked much like Fred's. Not only did his classes begin with a discussion of current events, but his lectures also contained numerous references to political and economic history. On closer inspection, though, major differences emerged. During a unit on the Depression and the New Deal, Bill delivered a series of mini-lectures, as most history teachers do. However, the lectures were supplemented with alternative activities. During one period, students worked in small groups on an activity entitled “You Are the President.” Presented with a series of problems, among them unemployment, bank failures, malnutrition, and farm foreclosures, students generated solutions and possible courses of action. Bill used this activity to foreshadow a lecture on the problems Franklin Roosevelt faced and the legislation proposed to deal with those problems. On another day, Bill used pictures taken by Farm Security Administration photographers to spark a discussion on the plight of the farmers. In another class, he xeroxed portions of The Grapes of Wrath and had students read them aloud. By presenting his students with social and cultural perspectives, Bill sought to balance his own strengths in political and economic history.

简在课堂上也采用了类似的教学策略,但她并没有像其他人那样以讨论时事新闻开始每一节课,而是通过关灯、放映一系列幻灯片来吸引学生的注意力。她用幻灯片展示了“咆哮的二十年代”的场景,包括时髦女郎、音乐家、像盖茨比那样的豪宅、加州淘金者、福特T型车以及“尘暴”时期的农民。她播放了一段爵士乐磁带,并就爵士乐的文化起源做了简短的讲解。

Jane used similar instructional strategies in her classroom, but rather than start each class with a discussion of current events, she grabbed her student's attention by turning off the lights and projecting a series of slides. She introduced a unit on the Roaring Twenties with slides of flappers, musicians, mansions like Gatsby's, California gold diggers, Model T's, and Dust Bowl farmers. She played a jazz tape and gave a short lecture on the cultural origins of jazz.

她解释说,爵士乐融合了布鲁斯和拉格泰姆,为了说明这一点,她让学生们分别聆听了这两种音乐的选段。课程结束时,简再次播放了爵士乐录音带,并让学生们找出其中可以听出这两种早期音乐传统的段落。第二天,她用这个音乐比喻来解释……20世纪20年代——“爵士时代”。她解释说,一方面是“时髦女郎和她们的男伴”,她们赊账购物,跳着查尔斯顿舞;另一方面则是受压迫的黑人、贫困的农民和被剥削的移民。经过两天的介绍,简开设了一个单元,内容包括关于赊购的讲座、《了不起的盖茨比》《愤怒的葡萄》的节选阅读,以及关于“尘暴”的幻灯片展示。学生们学习了社会、文化、政治和经济问题。他们阅读一手和二手资料,研究照片,分析图表,并参与辩论。简以爵士乐为隐喻构建了整个单元,并在各个章节中穿插了人物、地点和事件的描述。通过图片、音乐、艺术和舞蹈,她赋予了历史事实以生命。在她的课堂上,过去是一出上演的戏剧,而不是死记硬背的剧本。事实不仅被讲述,还被歌唱、见证和体验。

Jazz, she explained, melded blues and ragtime, and to convey this, she had her students listen to selections of each. To cap the lesson, Jane replayed the jazz tape and asked her students to identify points where they could hear either of the two earlier musical traditions. The following day, she used this musical metaphor to frame her explanation of the 1920s—the “Jazz Age.” At one extreme, she explained, were the “flappers and their fellas” buying on credit and dancing the Charleston. At the other were oppressed blacks, impoverished farmers, and exploited immigrants. After this two-day introduction, Jane presented a unit that included lectures on buying on margin, readings from The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, and a presentation of slides of the Dust Bowl. Students learned about social, cultural, political, and economic issues. They read primary and secondary source materials, studied photographs, analyzed graphs, and engaged in debate. After structuring the unit with the jazz metaphor, Jane filled individual periods with references to people, places, events. Through pictures, music, art, and dance, she breathed life into the facts of history. In her classroom the past was a drama enacted rather than a script learned by rote. Facts were not just told but sung, witnessed, and experienced.

学科视角的影响

THE INFLUENCE OF DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

我们对这四位教师的对比表明,他们的本科训练在某种程度上影响了他们的教学过程和内容。对他们而言,学习教学意味着发展一种包含教学目标和教学策略的理念,但这同时也意味着学习学科知识和教学法。凯西精通人类学,但她却要教九年级的“社会研究”,正如她的教科书所说,这门课融合了“七门不同的社会科学”。弗雷德精通政治学,却要教美国历史、亚洲历史和入门代数。简的本科专业是20世纪初,但她却被要求教授一门美国历史概论课程,内容涵盖从“五月花号”登陆到登月的历史。

The contrasts we have drawn among these four teachers suggest some ways in which their undergraduate training influenced the process and content of their instruction. For them, learning to teach involved developing a philosophy that embraced their goals for instruction as well as their strategies of instruction, but this meant learning about subject matter as well as about pedagogy. Cathy knew anthropology, but she had to teach ninth-grade “social studies,” an amalgam, as her textbook put it, of “seven distinct social sciences.”4 Fred knew political science but had to teach American history, Asian history, and introductory algebra. Jane's undergraduate specialty was the early 1900s, but she was expected to teach a survey course in U.S. history, from the landing of the Mayflower to the landing on the moon.

任何一个准备成为社会研究教师的人都不可能精通所有可能被要求教授的科目。没有哪个本科专业能够完全涵盖典型的社会研究课程要求。因此,凯茜和弗雷德开始教历史时,我们发现他们处于劣势也就不足为奇了。比尔和简也一样,他们不得不手忙脚乱地准备教授一些他们从未接触过的美国历史时期;比尔对杰克逊时代的民主知之甚少,而简在讲授大萧条时期的经济学时几乎惊慌失措。我们所有的老师都需要学习大量的学科内容,以及大量的教学方法。

No one who prepares to become a social studies teacher can know all of the subjects he or she may be called on to teach. No single undergraduate major corresponds to the demands of the typical social studies curriculum. So it is not surprising that we found Cathy and Fred at a disadvantage when they began to teach history. Bill and Jane had to scramble too as they prepared to teach units on periods of American history that they had never studied; Bill knew little about Jacksonian democracy, and Jane almost panicked when she had to lecture on the economics of the Depression. All of our teachers had as much to learn about content as about the teaching of it.

我们这位老师的本科训练如何影响他们的教学尤其值得关注。他们所接受的课程以及后来教授的课程都受到他们已知和未知知识的影响。弗雷德的美国历史课变成了政治学研究——他不仅强调政治和经济,而且围绕这些主题组织了整个课程。由于不了解历史的整体结构,他借用了政治学框架来组织和梳理他阅读并随后教授的美国历史新信息。⁵同样,凯西也运用她对人类学和考古学结构的了解来理解她同时学习和教授的社会科学。在运用这些结构时,凯西和弗雷德都倾向于过度概括,例如弗雷德声称所有革命都是一样的,以及凯西认为政府会以公民的最大利益为出发点行事。两位老师都犯了一个历史学家不断抨击的错误:忽略了历史背景。

How our teacher's undergraduate training influenced their teaching is especially interesting. The curriculum they were given and the courses they subsequently taught were shaped by what they did and did not know. Fred's U.S. history course became the study of political science—he not only emphasized politics and economics but organized the entire course around those themes. Unaware of the broad structures of history, he borrowed a framework from political science to organize and sequence the new information in American history that he read about and then later taught.5 In much the same way, Cathy used her knowledge of the structures of anthropology and archeology to make sense of the social sciences she was simultaneously learning and teaching. In using those structures, both Cathy and Fred tended to overgeneralize, as in Fred's claim that all revolutions are the same and Cathy's belief that governments act in their citizen's best interests. Generalizing across periods and events, both teachers committed a sin against which historians constantly rail: the failure to consider context.

从某种意义上说,弗雷德的政治学知识和凯茜的人类学及考古学知识主导了他们的课程选择,但从另一个重要的意义上说,正是他们知识的匮乏对他们的教学产生了决定性的影响。由于不了解历史既包含事实也包含诠释,他们缺乏足够的知识去寻求其他的诠释。凯茜和弗雷德对比尔德和贝林、摩根和米勒等人一无所知,他们误以为只要掌握了教科书中的人名、日期和事件,就等于学会了历史。正如他们的学科知识限制了他们教授历史的方式一样,他们对历史知识的匮乏也限制了他们学习和理解新学科的能力。认识到自身的无知是学习过程中一个重要的初始阶段。在某种程度上,弗雷德和凯茜尚未达到这个阶段。

In a sense, Fred's knowledge of political science and Cathy's knowledge of anthropology and archeology dominated their curricular choices, but in another important sense, it was their lack of knowledge that was most decisive in their instruction. Not knowing that history is as much interpretation as fact, they did not know enough to seek out alternative interpretations. Unaware of Beard and Bailyn, Morgan and Miller, Cathy and Fred believed that they had learned history once they had accumulated the names, dates, and events they read about in textbooks. Just as their disciplinary knowledge limited the ways in which they taught history to their students, so their lack of knowledge about history limited their ability to learn and understand new subject matter. The cognizance of ignorance is an important first stage in learning. In some ways, Fred and Cathy had not yet reached this stage.

另一方面,比尔和简则拥有丰富的历史知识。尽管这些新手常常需要摸索着学习新的学科知识,但他们对历史学科更广泛、更准确的理解帮助他们寻找新的信息。他们各自拥有一套精心设计的组织框架——比尔的框架主要侧重于政治和经济,简的框架则侧重于社会和文化。这些框架对两位老师都同样适用。每学习一个新单元,他们都需要掌握大量知识,但他们能够将这些新信息融入到本科历史学习中获得的框架之中。他们意识到解释和多重因果关系的重要性,因此也能够主动寻找……他们会考虑对历史事件的不同解释,并将这些观点融入教学中。例如,比尔对罗斯福经济政策的政治解读了解颇多,但对新政中涉及少数族裔的问题却知之甚少。然而,他对多元视角的了解使他意识到需要去寻找这类信息。弗雷德和凯西则缺乏这种敏感性,他们把备课时间都花在阅读教科书和教师指南上,结果被大量的史实信息淹没,难以用他们最熟悉的学科视角去理解这些史实。

Bill and Jane, on the other hand, were steeped in historical knowledge. Although these novices often had to learn new subject matter by the seat of their pants, their broader and more accurate conceptions of the discipline of history aided them in their search for new information. Each possessed an elaborate organizing scheme6—Bill's being primarily political and economic, Jane's social and cultural. These frameworks served each teacher equally well. With every new unit, they had a great deal to learn, but they placed this new information in frameworks they had acquired through their undergraduate training in history. Aware of the importance of interpretation and multiple causation, they were also able to seek out competing explanations for historical events and incorporate these views in their teaching. For instance, Bill knew a great deal about the political interpretations of Roosevelt's economic programs but little about minority issues related to the New Deal. His knowledge of multiple perspectives, however, made him aware of the need to search out such information. Fred and Cathy, lacking that sensitivity, spent their planning time reading textbooks and teacher's guides, becoming mired in factual information, and struggling to find ways—using the disciplinary lenses most familiar to them—to make sense of the facts.

老师们的学科视角也影响了他们的教学目标。简热爱历史,欣赏历史的复杂性和延续性。她坚信学生需要接触过去,并从历史遗产中汲取诸多经验。作为一名历史学家,她希望学生热爱并欣赏历史。比尔同样欣赏历史的丰富内涵,但他主要从政治角度研究历史,认为学生应该了解过去如何影响我们当今的政治体系。对他而言,历史知识意味着赋予学生政治力量。比尔的目标反映了他对政治的关注;他较少谈论历史遗产,而更多地强调共同的政治和经济主题。弗雷德则将他对当下的热情发挥到了极致。他致力于培养有教养、有责任感的公民,认为历史的重要性仅限于服务于这一目标。如果他无法看出某个历史事件与学生的生活有何关联,他就会尽可能快速地略过它。他致力于培养有良知的公民,这种想法值得称赞,但具有讽刺意味的是,他缺乏历史知识,这使他无法认识到并建立他所珍视的过去与现在之间的联系。

Our teacher's disciplinary perspectives also influenced their goals for instruction. Jane loved history and appreciated its complexity and continuity. She fervently believed that students needed to be exposed to the past and could learn much from its legacy. As a historian, she wanted students to love and appreciate history. Bill, equally appreciative of history's richness, studied history primarily from a political perspective and thought that students should be aware of the ways in which the past has influenced our present political system. For him, knowledge of history meant politically empowering students. Bill's goals reflected his concern for politics; he spent less time talking about the legacy of history and more time emphasizing common political and economic themes. Fred took his passion for the present to an extreme. Dedicated to creating educated, committed citizens, he thought history important only insofar as it served this goal. If he could not see a relationship between a past event and his student's lives, he glossed over it as quickly as possible. His concern for developing conscientious citizens was laudable, but, ironically, his lack of historical knowledge prevented him from recognizing and then forging the connections between past and present that he so valued.

凯西最初是以人类学家的身份进入教职的,起初她的教学目标也与她的学科紧密相关。然而,在她全职教学的第一年,她被分配到九年级社会研究课,拿到的教材却侧重于七门社会科学,而不仅仅是人类学。由于她对许多地区并不熟悉,教科书成了她教学的核心工具。开学两个月后,她感慨道:

Cathy entered teaching as an anthropologist, and initially her goals for instruction were wedded to her discipline. However, in her first year of full-time teaching, she was assigned a ninth-grade social studies class and handed curricular materials that placed heavy emphasis on seven social sciences, not just anthropology. Given her lack of familiarity with many regions, the textbook emerged as the central tool in her instruction. Two months into the school year she remarked:

我有时确实很依赖教科书。我的意思是,我需要这样的东西,它能让我专注于前进的方向。它非常详尽……我得上四年大学才能完全了解中东历史,而我们现在只需要……应该让他们对中东有一个整体的了解……我现在正在非常仔细地阅读这本书,因为我不确定这本书会提供什么,所以我正在逐章阅读有关中东的内容。

I really do depend [on the textbook] at times. I mean, I need something like this, I mean, it keeps me focused on what direction I should be moving in. It's very detailed…. I would have to go to college for four years to understand completely the history of the Middle East, and here we're just supposed to give them an overall feeling for the Middle East…I'm following the book pretty closely right now because I'm not sure what the book has to offer and so I'm taking the Middle East and going through it chapter by chapter.

面对兼顾其他学科视角的课程材料,凯西不得不重新思考她对社会世界的理解。她的教科书声称,要理解人类发展,必须考虑七个知识领域:地理、历史、政治学、心理学、人类学、社会学和经济学。这种影响对凯西的思维方式显而易见。开学三个月后,她就认为书中的七部分结构“自然而然”,并认为从这七个角度研究每一种文化都是“常识”。凯西对九年级学生的教学目标也发生了更大的转变。受教科书学科融合理念的影响,这位在实习期间希望将学生培养成“小小人类学家”的老师,如今却希望将他们培养成“小小社会科学家”,让他们“能够从这七个方面审视文化,并告诉我每个方面一两个重要的关键概念”。

Presented with curricular materials that gave equal time to other disciplinary perspectives, Cathy was forced to rethink her understanding of the social world. Her textbook claimed that to understand human development, seven areas of knowledge must be considered: geography, history, political science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics. The influence on Cathy's thinking was evident. Three months into the school year, she already viewed the book's seven-part organization as “natural” and thought that it was “common sense” to study every culture from these seven vantage points. An even greater transformation occurred in Cathy's goals for her ninth graders. Influenced by her textbook's disciplinary ecumenicalism, a woman who during her student teaching wanted to turn her students into “mini-anthropologists” now wanted to turn them into “mini-social scientists” who “can look at the culture through all seven aspects and tell me one or two of the important key concepts of each.”

教授认知之道

TEACHING THE WAYS OF KNOWING

这四个故事对教师培训和教学研究都具有重要意义。凯茜、弗雷德、比尔和简对社会科学的各个学科有着截然不同的认知和信念。这里我们以历史为例进行说明。然而,这四位教师在其社会研究教学生涯中都将需要教授多个社会科学学科。他们的困境表明,了解所教学科的结构对教学至关重要。如果弗雷德和凯茜对历史学科有更深入的了解,他们或许会更容易学习历史,也更不容易向学生误解历史学科。

These four stories have implications for both teacher training and research on teaching in general. Cathy, Fred, Bill, and Jane know and believe very different things about the disciplines that represent the social sciences. Here we have used history as an illustrative example. Yet these four individuals will be expected to teach several of these disciplines throughout their careers as social studies teachers. Their travails suggest that knowing the structures of the disciplines they teach is critical to teaching. Had Fred and Cathy known more about history as a discipline, they might have found it easier to learn about history and been less likely to misrepresent that discipline to their students.

学习学科并非仅仅是获取新知识,它还包含对先前持有的信念进行审视。凯茜和弗雷德作为社会研究教师,接触了大量的历史资料,但他们对历史的幼稚甚至有时扭曲的理解,如同强有力的筛子,过滤掉了新信息。弗雷德对历史事实的认知根深蒂固,以至于当他在历史教科书中看到一系列对罗斯福的不同解读时,他想当然地认为这些解读出自一位政治学家之手。一位开明的教科书作者决定引用。这种观念根深蒂固,要根除它们,需要的不是一把锄头,而是一台推土机。

Learning about disciplines is not simply a matter of acquiring new knowledge; it entails examining previously held beliefs. Cathy and Fred were exposed to a great deal of historical information as social studies teachers, but their naive and, at times, distorted conceptions of history acted as powerful sieves through which new information was filtered. Fred's view of history as fact was so entrenched that, when exposed to a series of alternative interpretations of Roosevelt in a history textbook, he assumed that they were written by a political scientist whom some enlightened textbook writer had decided to cite. Such beliefs run deep, and uprooting them may require not the equivalent of a garden hoe, but a bulldozer.

本文报告的结果也对教师知识研究具有重要意义。我们这位教师对学科的“知识”与其说是事实和诠释的积累,不如说是其信念的产物。弗雷德教了一年美国历史后,掌握了大量的历史信息。他以优异的成绩通过了全国教师历史考试。但这是否意味着弗雷德就懂历史了呢?

The results reported here also have implications for research on teacher knowledge. Our teacher's “knowledge” of the subject matter was as much a product of their beliefs as an accumulation of facts and interpretations. After a year of teaching American history, Fred had learned vast amounts of historical information. He took and passed with flying colors the National Teachers Examination in history. Does this mean that Fred knows history?

历史远不止于对过去的了解。它既不能握在手中,也不能放在图书馆的书架上。虽然过去是历史的原材料,但历史远远超越了过去。雅克·巴尔赞解释道:

History extends beyond knowledge of the past. It can neither be held in one's hand nor put on a shelf in a library. While the raw material of history is the past, history goes well beyond that past. Jacques Barzun explains:

历史感并非存在于任何一套装订成册的书籍中。它存在于人的头脑中;这种头脑虽然源于天生的好奇心,却需要通过阅读真正的历史作品来加以培养。让我再次重申一下公认的历史学家们一直以来所理解的:真正的历史是一种叙述,它展现了动机、行动和结果之间的链条。时间顺序——年表——必须清晰明了。日期之所以重要,仅仅是为了在动机、行动和结果的链条中起到定位作用。这条链条不必很长……但必须足够复杂,因为动机和行动涉及众多个体,总是错综复杂,只有全面了解之前的错综复杂,才能理解最终的结果。7

A sense of history does not reside in any set of bound books. It is something in someone's head; and that something, though born of natural curiosity, has to be cultivated in a certain way, by reading genuine history. Let me say once again what recognized, acknowledged historians have always understood to be genuine: it is a narrative that sets forth a chain of motive, action, result. The sequence in time—chronology—must be clear. Dates are important solely for this purpose of orientation in the stream of motives, actions, results. The chain need not be long…but it must be thick, for the motives and actions, being those of many individuals, are always tangled, and the results cannot be understood unless a full view of that preceding tangle is given.7

我们相信所有新老师都是聪明能干、口齿伶俐、富有爱心的人,他们勤奋钻研教学技艺。然而,并非所有人都具备扎实的历史知识。由于我们选择以历史为讨论重点,凯西和弗雷德的表现显得不够出色;但如果我们选择人类学,对凯西教学的描述将会更加精彩。同样,如果我们选择政治学作为讨论重点,弗雷德的表现也会更加出彩。

We believe that all of our new teachers were bright, articulate, caring individuals who worked hard at learning their craft. Still, not all of them possessed a robust sense of history. By choosing to use history as the focus of our discussion, we have made Cathy and Fred look less than competent, but had we chosen anthropology, our accounts of Cathy's teaching would have sparkled. Likewise, Fred would have shone had our focus been political science.

社会研究教师需要掌握诸多知识,指望年轻教师精通历史人类学社会学经济学,从而能够准确地呈现这些学科并有效地进行教学,是不现实的。学习并非仅仅是接触新信息,因为新信息往往难以撼动根深蒂固的信念。事实上,我们每位教师都是充满热情的学习者。当一个人对自身学科之外的认知方式感到陌生时,新信息就会沦为旧有观念和基本信念的奴隶。保持现状。教授认知方式远不止于方法论课程,而且显然,教师教育者无法独自完成这项工作。然而,培养未来教师对不同认知方式的意识是我们努力的目标。这是一个值得追求的目标。

Social studies teachers have to know many things, and it is unreasonable to expect that young teachers will know enough about history and anthropology and sociology and economics to represent them accurately and teach them effectively. Learning is not merely an encounter with new information, for new information is often no match for deeply held beliefs. Indeed, each of our teachers is an enthusiastic learner. When one is unfamiliar with the ways of knowing in disciplines other than one's own, new information becomes a slave to the old, and fundamental beliefs go unaltered. Teaching the ways of knowing encompasses more than a methods course, and, clearly, teacher educators cannot do it alone. Creating in prospective teachers an awareness of different ways of knowing is, however, within our sights. It is a worthy goal.

笔记

NOTES

本章的实地调研工作于1985年至1987年进行,是“教学知识增长项目”(Knowledge Growth in Teaching Project)的一部分,该项目由李·舒尔曼(Lee S. Shulman)担任首席研究员,并由斯宾塞基金会(Spencer Foundation)资助。该项目为期三年,旨在研究新任高中教师学科知识的发展。凯西和弗雷德都是该项目的受访者,他们的访谈从进入教师教育项目开始,一直持续到他们正式任教的第一年。在整个项目期间,他们每人接受了大约十四次访谈,并且分别在各自的课堂上接受了多次教学观察。

The fieldwork for this chapter was conducted in 1985–87 under the Knowledge Growth in Teaching Project, for which Lee S. Shulman was principal investigator, and funded by the Spencer Foundation. This project was a three-year study investigating the development of subject matter knowledge in new high school teachers. Both Cathy and Fred were informants in this project, beginning with their entry into their teacher education programs and continuing through their first year of full-time teaching. Each was interviewed approximately fourteen times throughout the project, and both were observed several times in their respective classrooms.

本章最初由我与苏珊娜·威尔逊(Suzanne Wilson)合著,并以第一作者身份发表于《教师学院记录》(Teachers College Record )第89卷(1988年),第525-539页。本书对此章略作编辑和更新。自本文最初发表以来,历史和社会研究教学方面的研究已显著扩展;参见弗吉尼亚·理查森(Virginia Richardson)主编的《教学研究手册》(Handbook of Research on Teaching)第四版(纽约,2001年)中苏珊娜·威尔逊关于“历史教学”的章节和彼得·塞克斯(Peter Seixas)关于“社会研究教学”的章节。另请参阅克里斯·哈斯班兹(Chris Husbands)撰写的非常实用的概述性著作:《什么是历史教学?学习过去的语言、思想和意义》(英国白金汉,1996年),该书主要面向中学教师。

 

This chapter was originally co-written with Suzanne Wilson and appeared with her as first author in Teachers College Record 89 (1988), 525–39. It has been slightly edited and updated for this volume. Research on history and social studies teaching has expanded considerably since this paper originally appeared; see Suzanne Wilson's chapter on “History Teaching” and Peter Seixas's chapter on “Social Studies Teaching” in Virginia Richardson, ed., Handbook of Research on Teaching, 4th ed. (New York, 2001). See, as well, the very useful overview, geared primarily to teachers at the secondary level, by Chris Husbands: What Is History Teaching? Language, Ideas, and Meaning in Learning About the Past (Buckingham, England, 1996).

 

1.此处使用的名字均为化名。大段引语和带引号的文字摘自访谈记录和实地笔记。

1. The names used here are pseudonyms. Block quotations and words within quotation marks are excerpts from transcribed interview and field notes.

2. Sigrun Gudmundsdottir、Neil B. Carey 和 Suzanne M. Wilson,“先前学科知识在学习教授社会研究中的作用”,职业知识增长项目技术报告第CC-05 号(斯坦福:斯坦福大学教育学院,1985 年)。

2. Sigrun Gudmundsdottir, Neil B. Carey, and Suzanne M. Wilson, “Role of Prior Subject Knowledge in Learning to Teach Social Studies,” Knowledge Growth in a Profession Project Technical Report No. CC-05 (Stanford: Stanford University, School of Education, 1985).

3. Robin G. Collingwood,《历史的观念》牛津,1946 年),第 177 页。

3. Robin G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), 177.

4.探索世界文化(纽约,1984 年)

4. Exploring World Cultures (New York, 1984).

5.我们采用 Joseph J. Schwab 在 Ian Westbury 和 Neil J. Wilkof 编辑的《科学、课程和博雅教育》 (芝加哥,1978 年)一书中提出的“结构”概念。

5. We use “structure” in the sense suggested by Joseph J. Schwab, “Education and the Structure of the Disciplines,” in Ian Westbury and Neil J. Wilkof, eds., Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education (Chicago, 1978).

6. Richard C. Anderson,“图式概念与教育事业™”,载于 Richard C. Anderson、Rand S. Spiro 和 William E. Montagne编,《学校教育与知识获取》(新泽西州希尔斯代尔,1979 年),第 415-31 页。

6. Richard C. Anderson, “The Notion of Schemata and the Educational Enterprise,™ in Richard C. Anderson, Rand S. Spiro, and William E. Montagne, eds., Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge (Hillsdale, N.J., 1979), 415–31.

7. Jacques Barzun,“沃尔特·普雷斯科特·韦伯与历史的命运™”,载于 Dennis Rinehart 和 Stephen E. Maizlish 编,《沃尔特·普雷斯科特·韦伯与历史教学论文集》(德克萨斯州大学城,1985 年)。有关此引文所提出问题的更详细讨论,请参见 Richard J. Evans,《为历史辩护》(伦敦,1997 年)。

7. Jacques Barzun, “Walter Prescott Webb and the Fate of History,™ in Dennis Rinehart and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds., Essays on Walter Prescott Webb and the Teaching of History (College Station, Texas, 1985). For an extended discussion of the issues raised by this quotation, see Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997).

7

7

历史教学中的智慧模式

Models of Wisdom in the Teaching of History

与苏珊娜·M·威尔逊

With Suzanne M. Wilson

关于历史课堂的负面描述比比皆是。我们的17岁学生知道什么?》一书中,戴安娜·拉维奇和切斯特·芬恩分析了1987年全国教育进步评估的结果,并将典型的历史课堂描述为:学生们……

Grim portrayals of history classrooms abound. In What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?, an analysis of the findings of the 1987 National Assessment of Educational Progress, Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn describe the typical history classroom as one in which students

他们听老师讲解当天的课程,使用课本,参加考试。偶尔他们会看电影。有时他们会背诵信息或阅读有关事件和人物的故事。他们很少与其他同学合作,很少使用原始资料,很少写学期论文,也很少讨论所学内容的意义。

listen to the teacher explain the day's lesson, use the textbook, and take tests. Occasionally they watch a movie. Sometimes they memorize information or read stories about events and people. They seldom work with other students, use original documents, write term papers, or discuss the significance of what they are studying.1

这些发现并非个例;令人遗憾的是,这才是常态。20世纪60年代中期对印第安纳州社会研究教学的一项调查也得出了类似的结论,而最近的研究也鲜有例外。3

These findings are not the exception; sadly, they are the rule. Similar conclusions emerged from an examination of social studies instruction in Indiana in the mid-sixties,2 and more recent research has shown few deviations.3

鉴于这种一致性,我们或许已经达到了研究“典型”或“代表性”课堂的收益递减点。我们对这类课堂的实际情况已经有了相当清晰的了解。因此,在教师评估项目中,我和我的同事有意识地避开了寻常的课堂,转而关注非凡的课堂,从研究概率转向深入探究可能性。

In light of this consistency, we may have reached a point of diminishing returns in studying the “typical” or “representative” classroom. We have a fairly good sense of what occurs in such classes. Instead, in our work with the Teacher Assessment Project,4 my colleagues and I have conscientiously avoided the ordinary to focus on the extraordinary, moving from the study of the probable to a close examination of the possible.

为此,我们对11位经验丰富的高中历史教师开展了一系列“实践智慧”研究。(我们也对11位数学教师进行了类似的研究。)我们的工作基于这样的信念:许多关于优秀教学的知识从未被纳入专业文献,而是留在优秀教师的头脑中。通过一系列深入的访谈和观察,我们试图收集、记录并描述这11位由同行提名的专家教师的知识、思想和实践。以下将介绍其中两位教师及其对历史教学的思考。

To do this, we have undertaken a series of “Wisdom of Practice” studies with eleven experienced high school history teachers. (A similar set of studies was conducted with eleven math teachers.) Our work was guided by the belief that much knowledge about good teaching never finds its way into the professional literature, remaining instead in the minds of good teachers. Through a series of in-depth interviews and observations, we attempted to cull, capture, and describe what these eleven peer-nominated expert practitioners know, think, and do. What follows is an account of two of these teachers and how they think about the history they teach.

隐形教师

THE INVISIBLE TEACHER

星期一上午,伊丽莎白·詹森的美国历史课第一节课开始了。她的学生们,形形色色,有白人、黑人、亚裔和拉丁裔,走进教室,把课桌分成三组。左边是“叛军”;右边是“保皇党”;前面是“法官”。詹森坐在教室一旁,膝上放着一本螺旋笔记本,手里拿着铅笔。她个子不高,三十多岁,嗓门洪亮。今天,她的声音却很轻,因为她的十一年级学生们正在就英国在美洲殖民地征税的合法性展开辩论。黑板上写着这样一句话:决议——英国政府拥有对美洲殖民地征税的合法权力

It is Monday morning in Elizabeth Jensen's5 first-period American history class. Her students, a collage of white, black, Asian, and Hispanic faces, enter her classroom and arrange their desks into three groups. On the left sits a group of “rebels”; on the right, “loyalists”; and in the front, “judges.” Off to the side, with a spiral notebook in her lap and pencil in hand, sits Jensen, a short woman in her late thirties with a booming voice. Today her voice is silent as her eleventh graders begin a debate on the legitimacy of British taxation in the American colonies. Written on the blackboard is this statement: Resolved—The British government possesses the legitimate authority to tax the American colonies.

叛军的第一位发言人是一位有着金色卷发、戴着一只垂坠耳环的女孩,她从笔记本上抽出一张纸,开始发言:

The first speaker for the rebels, a girl with blond curls and one dangling earring, takes a paper from her notebook and begins:

英国人说他们在这里驻扎军队是为了保护我们。乍一看,这似乎合情合理,但他们的说法其实毫无根据。首先,他们认为自己是在保护我们免受谁的侵害?法国人吗?引用我们的朋友贝利先生的话,6 “1763年巴黎和约签订后,法国的势力就被彻底赶出了北美大陆”……事实上,对我们秩序的唯一威胁是印第安人,但我们自己也有一支不错的民兵……那么,他们为什么要在这里驻扎军队呢?唯一可能的解释就是为了控制我们。随着越来越多的军队到来,我们珍视的每一项自由很快都将被剥夺。7

[The British say they keep] troops here for our own protection. On face value, this seems reasonable enough, but there is really no substance to their claims. First of all, who do they think they are protecting us from? The French? Quoting from our friend Mr. Bailey,6 “By the settlement in Paris in 1763, French power was thrown completely off the continent of North America”…In fact, the only threat to our order is the Indians, but we have a decent militia of our own…. So why are they putting troops here? The only possible reason is to keep us in line. With more and more troops coming over, soon every freedom we hold dear will be stripped away.7

另一位叛逆者,浑身散发着自信,站起来发言:

Another rebel, exuding self-confidence, rises to speak:

除了道德和实际问题之外,还有另一个重要事实需要指出。美洲殖民地已经自行征税……如果确信征税理由正当,殖民地显然愿意纳税。弗吉尼亚州议会就清楚地证明了这一点。1765年5月30日。8我们也愿意承担维护美洲和平所需的费用。然而,由于我们已经税负沉重,我们的能力有限。只有由我们自己决定增税方式,我们才会支付。

Aside from the moral and practical issues involved, there is another important fact to point out. The American colonies already tax themselves…. The colonies are clearly willing to pay taxes if they can be assured that the cause is just. This point was clearly demonstrated by the Virginia Legislature on May 30, 1765.8 We were also willing to pay our share of the expenses necessary to keep peace in America. However, because we already have heavy taxes, our ability is limited. We will pay only if the method of raising taxes is decided by ourselves.

一位身材高挑、留着渐变式发型的非裔美国学生从椅子上站起来,走到效忠派阵营的中央。他开始代表效忠派发表回应:

A tall African American student with a fade haircut rises from his chair and moves to the center of the loyalist contingent. He begins the loyalist's response:

让我们来看看我们为什么要缴税——主要原因可能是英国负债1.4亿英镑……你知道吗,他们一半以上的债务都是因为在法国印第安战争中保卫我们造成的?……没有代表权就不纳税是不公平的。事实上,这是暴政。然而,虚拟代表制使你的抱怨显得毫无道理。每个英国公民,无论他是否有投票权,都在议会中拥有代表权。为什么这种代表权不能扩展到美国?……如果这种代表权能覆盖300多英里外的曼彻斯特和伯明翰,为什么不能覆盖3000英里外的美国?难道他们不都是英国臣民和英国人吗?

Let's look at why we're being taxed—the main reason is probably because England has a debt of £140,000,000…. Did you know that over one-half of their debt was caused by defending us in the French and Indian War?…Taxation without representation isn't fair. Indeed, it's tyranny. Yet virtual representation9 makes this whining of yours an untruth. Every British citizen, whether he had a right to vote or not, is represented in Parliament. Why does this representation not extend to America?…If it reaches over 300 miles to Manchester and Birmingham, why can it not reach 3,000 miles to America? Are they not alike British subjects and Englishmen?

一名反叛者站出来质问效忠派在这个问题上的看法。

A rebel rises to question the loyalists on this point.

反叛者:我们向王室纳税能得到什么好处?

Rebel: What benefits do we get out of paying taxes to the crown?

保皇党:我们受益于这种保护——

Loyalist: We benefit from the protection—

叛逆者:你声称的唯一好处就是保护吗?

Rebel: Is that the only benefit you claim—protection?

保皇党:你有点自私,竟然认为可以只拿别人给的东西而不缴纳税款。你凭什么不向英国纳税?

Loyalist: You're being a bit selfish in thinking it's all right to take what is given and not [pay] taxes that are levied. How can you justify not having to pay taxes to England?

反叛者:我们不是说我们不应该缴税。我们是说,我们不应该在没有议会代表的情况下缴税——缴税却对议会事务没有发言权……

Rebel: We're not saying we shouldn't have to pay taxes. We're saying that we shouldn't have to pay taxes without being represented in Parliament—paying taxes and not having a say in what's going…

在她有机会说完话之前,一群效忠派人士高喊“奶油!奶油!奶油!”,这是他们用来表示对方犯了所谓事实或概念错误的说法。现在,效忠派人士有短暂的时间向法官陈述他们的理由:

Before she has a chance to finish her sentence, a chorus of loyalists shout “cream, cream, cream” the term they use to signal that an alleged factual or conceptual error has been made by the other side. The loyalists now have a brief moment to state their case before the judges:

保皇党:我们在议会里代表——通过虚拟代表我们是英国公民,在议会里有代表。我们本来有机会……在英国真正拥有代表权,但你们(指责地指向叛乱分子)却不想……英国很多公民只有虚拟代表权,他们只有这个,所以情况一样——

Loyalist: We are represented in Parliament—by virtual representation. We are British citizens and are represented in Parliament. We had the opportunity to…be actually represented in Britain but you [pointing accusingly at the rebels] did not want to…. Many citizens in Britain have virtual representation, that's all they have so it's the sa—

反叛者:不!他们既有虚拟代表,也有现实代表。

Rebel: No! They have virtual and actual representation.

保皇党:不!在大城市里,他们只有虚拟身份,所以你和英国的许多英国公民完全一样。

Loyalist: No! In the larger cities, they have only virtual, so you are exactly the same as many of the British citizens in England.

房间里顿时一片嘈杂,充斥着指责和反驳。“跟伯明翰那边一样!”一名效忠派人士喊道。10一名叛乱分子他轻蔑地哼了一声,“虚拟代表制就是扯淡。”三十二名学生似乎同时在争论,而主持审判的法官——一位戴着玳瑁眼镜的瘦削黑人学生——则敲着法槌。但他的同学们——一群争吵不休的保皇派和反叛派——却对他置之不理。詹森仍然站在角落里,膝上还放着螺旋笔记本,发出了她当天唯一的命令。“都给我安静!”她厉声喝道。秩序瞬间恢复,法官们维持了保皇派的“胜利”。

For a moment, the room is a cacophony of charges and countercharges. “It's the same as in Birmingham” shouts a loyalist.10 A rebel snorts disparagingly, “Virtual representation is bull.” Thirty-two students seem to be talking at once, while the presiding judge, a thin black student with horn-rimmed glasses, bangs his gavel. But his classmates—warring loyalists and rebels—ignore him. Jensen, still in the corner, still with spiral notebook in her lap, issues her sole command of the day. “Hold still!” she thunders. Order is restored instantly, and the judges uphold the loyalist's “cream.”

经过双方的开场陈述和一天半的交叉质询后,辩论在第三天以反叛者和效忠派的总结陈词结束。效忠派的最后一位发言人,留着齐肩长发,身穿褪色的牛仔夹克,站起来向他的同学们发表讲话:

After opening statements by both sides followed by a day and a half of cross-examination, the debate concludes on the third day with closing statements by rebels and loyalists. The final speaker for the loyalists, with shoulder-length hair and faded denim jacket, stands to address his classmates:

我们国家的政府有权向我们征税吗?当然有权。当这个问题这样表述时,任何相反的论点都显得愚蠢至极。然而,我们那些鲁莽的同胞却认为我们应该免除这项责任……他们说,他们没有代表权,所以为什么要纳税?与此同时,他们拒绝在议会中拥有代表权……他们到底想要什么?一个超过半数议会席位的代表力量吗?如果他们试图废除殖民地税收,当然会被否决,就像任何一个试图这样做的英国地区一样。认为他们应该获得如此巨大的代表权是荒谬的,所以他们说税收本身就是个骗局。他们不需要保护,因为英国已经解决了法国和西班牙的问题。他们非常确信,在遭受重创之后,无论是这些国家还是其他任何国家都不会再来攻击他们。但是一旦关系破裂,美洲将再次沦为一片混乱之地……显而易见,纳税比与英国开战要好得多,这能大大减少我们所有人的冲突。因此,我郑重呼吁:请保持理性。我们的国家有权向我们征税吗?当然有权。

Does our country's government have the right to tax us? Of course. When the question is phrased in this manner, arguments to the contrary seem moronic. Yet our rash compatriots have taken to the idea that we should be exempt of this responsibility…. They are not given representation, they say, so why should they pay taxes? Simultaneously, they refused representation in Parliament…What do they want? A representative force that equals over half of Parliament? Of course they will be outvoted if they try to do away with colonial taxation, as would any British district that attempted such a maneuver. It's preposterous to assume that they should get a humongous representative vote, so they say that the taxes themselves are a fraud. They need no protection, seeing that Britain has taken care of France and Spain. They are quite secure in the fact that neither these nor any other countries will attack after the sound beating they received. But once ties are severed, America once again becomes a free-for-all…. It should be painfully clear that paying taxes will produce much less strife for all of us than if we were to commence hostilities with Britain. So I put forth a resounding plea: Please be rational. Does our country have a right to tax us? Yes.

虽然我们没有对她的学生进行课前和课后测试,但我们认为像这样的陈述有力地证明了詹森课堂上学生的学习方式。请注意这位学生在构建这个陈述时所付出的细致努力,以及他为模仿十八世纪语言所付出的辛勤努力。尽管他犯了语言学家所说的“语域错误”(将叛乱分子要求代表权的诉求描述为“ humongous ”),但我们仍然可以看出他在其他方面取得的成功。他巧妙地运用了“commence hostilities”(开始敌对行动)和“it's preposterous to assume”(假设是荒谬的)等短语,捕捉到了那个时代精神——在那个时代,信息的风格与意义同等重要。十六岁的孩子通常不会“put out a slecting plea”(提出响亮的请求)。但在詹森的指导下,这位学生做到了。他潜心研究了十八世纪的原始文献,了解到语言本身有着丰富的历史。

While we did not administer pre- and post-tests to her students, we view statements such as this one as powerful evidence of the type of learning that goes on in Jensen's class. Note the care this student has taken in the construction of this statement, the pains he took to imitate the language of the eighteenth century. Because he committed what linguists call a “mistake in register” (calling the rebel's request for representation humongous), we can see how successful he has otherwise been. He gracefully uses such phrases as “commence hostilities” and “it's preposterous to assume” to capture the spirit of an age in which the style of a message was deemed as important as its meaning. Sixteen-year-olds do not normally “put forth a resounding plea.” Under Jensen's guidance, this student has immersed himself in the primary documents of the eighteenth century and has learned that language itself has a rich history.

让教师可见

MAKING THE TEACHER VISIBLE

在法官们仔细聆听了三天的证词后,房间里弥漫着紧张的气氛。学生们急切地想知道最终判决,窃窃私语,讨论着他们本可以提出的、肯定能说服法官支持自己的论点。尽管正式辩论已经结束,学生们仍在继续讨论十八世纪关于议会代表制的理念。与此同时,法官们努力将纷繁复杂的论点和反驳意见提炼成一个单一的判决。

While the judges wade through three days of testimony, nervousness pervades the room. Students, eager to learn the final verdict, whisper about points they might have made that would have surely swayed the judges to their side. Even though the formal debate is over, students continue to discuss eighteenth-century conceptions of parliamentary representation. Meanwhile, the judges work to reduce myriad points and counterpoints to a single decision.

三天来,伊丽莎白·詹森就像个隐形人,蜷缩在教室角落里,在笔记本上奋笔疾书。有时,她会抑制不住喜悦,对那些就“有益的忽视”或“自然权利的必要性”提出精辟见解的学生露出微笑。但除了“别动!”之外,她说的唯一一句话,都是提醒法官们时不时敲响法槌,维持秩序。在这三天里,詹森几乎没有做任何传统意义上的“教学”。她不讲课,不在黑板上写字,也不分发练习题、小测验或考试卷。

For three days, Elizabeth Jensen was an invisible presence in this classroom, nestled in the corner, scribbling notes on her pad. Sometimes, unable to contain her delight, she flashed a smile at a student who had made a particularly incisive point about “salutary neglect” or the “imperatives of natural rights.” But the only words she uttered (with the exception of “Hold still!”) were directed to the judges to remind them every so often to sound their gavels and maintain order. During these classes, Jensen did little that would conventionally be called “teaching.” She did not lecture; she did not write on the board; she did not distribute a worksheet, quiz, or test.

人们或许会认为,詹森之所以能高枕无忧,正如她自己所说,是因为她的学生让她可以“扮演上帝”。或许,面对这样一群积极性极高的青少年,任何老师都会如鱼得水。不可否认,詹森的学生确实很有动力。作为自觉选择的优秀学生,他们明知这门课需要付出额外的努力,却依然选择了它。然而,詹森的学生中,近三分之一来自少数族裔,但他们的背景与其他大型城市高中的学生并无显著差异。他们就读的这所综合性高中,甚至连外观和氛围都与其他城市学校别无二致——常见的斑驳油漆、裸露的管道,以及厕所隔间里零星的涂鸦。

One might think, initially, that it is Jensen's students who allow her to sit back and, in her words, “play God.” Perhaps with such seemingly motivated adolescents, any teacher would sparkle. There is no denying that Jensen's students are motivated. As self-selected honors students, they chose this class knowing that it required extra work. But Jensen's students, nearly a third of them from minority groups, are not dramatically different in background from other students in this and other large urban high schools. The comprehensive high school they attend even has the same look and feel as other urban schools—the usual cracked paint, exposed pipes, and scattered graffiti marking the stalls in the restrooms.

詹森在这场活动中似乎只扮演了一个小角色,这恰恰证明了她的艺术造诣。正如我们不会亲眼看到百老汇音乐剧的编舞站在舞台上指挥一群舞者一样,我们也看不到伊丽莎白·詹森的身影,看着她的学生们在关于税收合法性的辩论中构思观点、构建论据。编舞们会孜孜不倦地与舞者们一起训练,为他们准备……他们将独自成为舞台中心的时刻。同样,多年来,詹森也学会了如何培养学生成为忠诚者、反叛者和评判者。

The impression that Jensen played only a small role in this event is a testament to her artistry. For just as we don't see the choreographers of a Broadway musical standing on stage directing a troupe of dancers, so we don't see the hand of Elizabeth Jensen as her students shape ideas and craft arguments in a debate on the legitimacy of taxation. Choreographers work tirelessly with their dancers, preparing them for the moment when they will take center stage, alone. Similarly, Jensen has learned over the years how to prepare students to be loyalists, rebels, and judges.

例如,她知道青少年很难超越自身狭隘的经验,去理解那些与他们世界截然不同的人的问题、情感和动机。学生们之所以能够做到这一点,部分原因在于他们明白活动的成败取决于自己;他们知道,如果他们失败了,老师不会出手相助。有时,这意味着詹森不得不克制自己,让一些看似徒劳无功的事情持续更长时间。但她明白,鱼与熊掌不可兼得。“如果我除了制定规则防止争吵……或者防止课堂秩序崩溃之外,还采取其他措施,”她解释说,“那么他们就会把所有事情都指望在我身上。”

For example, she knows that it is not easy for adolescents to transcend the narrow realm of their experience and embrace the issues, emotions, and motivations of people whose world was vastly different from their own. What allows students to do so, in part, is knowing that the success of the activity is up to them; they know that their teacher will not step in to save them if they flounder. Sometimes this means that Jensen has to restrain herself and let a wild goose chase go on longer than it should. But she knows that she can't have it both ways. “If I enter with anything more than regulations to prevent it from becoming a shouting match…or [from] losing the structure” she explains, “then they are going to look to me for all of it.”

但詹森之所以能像编舞家一样,精心安排学习体验,引导学生探寻原因和动机,远不止是对青少年有着敏锐的理解。最重要的是,詹森的论述基于他对历史教学意义的独特见解,这种见解为课堂活动提供了结构,并赋予其深刻的意义。

But it is much more than a keen understanding of adolescents that allows Jensen to act as choreographer, arranging learning experiences that engage students in the search for cause and motive. Above all else, Jensen's debate rests on a vision of what it means to teach history, a vision that provides structure for classroom activities and infuses them with meaning.

在詹森看来,历史是由一些贯穿始终的理念和主题串联起来的,这些理念和主题赋予历史连贯性,并提供了一种理解丰富多彩的人类经验的方式。因此,詹森的学年并非以“大航海时代”单元中列举探险家名单开始,而是以一场关于“人性”的研讨会拉开序幕。学生们阅读哲学家(例如休谟、洛克、柏拉图和亚里士多德)、国家元首和革命家(例如杰斐逊、圣雄甘地和毛泽东)以及暴君(例如阿道夫·希特勒和贝尼托·墨索里尼)的著作节选。然后,他们向同学们展示这些观点。学生们了解到,关于人性的理论支撑着人们的选择,有些理论将人类描绘成开明的存在,仅次于天使,而另一些理论则将人类描绘成邪恶的恶棍,仅比野兽略好一点。几个月后,到了批准美国宪法的时候,这些现在为人熟知的人物——柏拉图、亚里士多德、休谟、洛克、艾玛·戈德曼、弗拉基米尔·列宁——再次被召集起来,接受热情洋溢的联邦党人和反联邦党人团体的游说。

For Jensen, history is held together by overarching ideas and themes, which lend coherence and provide a way of understanding the rich texture of human experience. And so Jensen's school year begins not with a list of explorers in a unit on the “Age of Discovery” but with a conference on “Human Nature.” Students read excerpts from the writings of philosophers (e.g., Hume, Locke, Plato, and Aristotle), heads of state and revolutionaries (e.g., Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mao Zedong), and tyrants (e.g., Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini). They then present these views to their classmates. Students learn that theories of human nature undergird the choices people make and that some theories depict humans as enlightened beings, just a step below angels, while others cast them as sinister wretches, just a step above beasts. When it comes time to ratify the U.S. Constitution some months later, these now-familiar figures—Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Locke, Emma Goldman, Vladimir Lenin—are reconvened to be courted by impassioned groups of Federalists and Anti-Federalists.

所有这些活动都体现了詹森想要传达的更深层次的道理:历史的创造是一个动态的过程。过去发生的事情并非命中注定,也并非有意为之。它的发生是由于人类行为。他们通过自己的选择塑造了他们的命运,就像今天的人们通过自己的选择塑造自己的未来一样。

All of these activities exemplify the larger lesson Jensen wants to impart: The making of history is a dynamic process. What happened in the past wasn't fated or meant to be. It occurred because human actors shaped their destinies by the choices they made, just as people today shape their futures by the choices they make.

启动进程

SETTING THE WHEELS IN MOTION

詹森对历史的理解是她吸引学生的关键所在。对她而言,美国历史远不止于特定的日期、人物或立法行为。历史的核心在于权威、自由和代表权等主题——这些主题将过去与现在联系起来,并为组织十一年级课程中海量的信息提供了一个框架。这一框架指导着她的课程决策,使她能够在学生接触相关概念的几个月前就有所预示。例如,当她在学年伊始引入十八世纪关于人性的观点时,她知道这些问题会在讨论宪法、权利法案和联邦制时再次出现。而且,早在学生开始准备这些辩论之前,詹森就已经通过向学生介绍一些能够引导他们思考权威本质的观点,为他们打下了基础。

Jensen's understanding of history is fundamental to the way she captures her student's minds. For her, American history is more than particular dates, persons, or legislative acts. History centers on such themes as authority, freedom, and representation—themes that bind past to present and provide a framework for organizing the mass of information in the eleventh-grade curriculum. This framework guides her curricular decisions, allowing her to foreshadow ideas months before her students confront them. For example, when she introduces eighteenth-century views of human nature at the beginning of the year, she knows that these same issues will resurface in discussions of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and federalism. And long before students begin to prepare for those debates, Jensen has already laid the groundwork by introducing students to ideas that set them thinking about the nature of authority.

她通过多种方式来实现这一点。在保皇派和反叛派辩论前两周,她布置学生阅读《学生权威手册》中的选段。这本油印小册子与她美国历史课程的主要单元相对应,是一种“非教科书式”的教材。学生们阅读了一篇名为《海上鞭笞》的短篇小说,讲述了一位船长殴打一名水手的故事。接下来,他们阅读了一篇名为《两个做出选择的人》的短文,这篇文章将乔赛亚·昆西(一位为波士顿惨案中被控谋杀的英国士兵辩护的律师)与罗莎·帕克斯(一位在一个半世纪后,因拒绝在阿拉巴马州蒙哥马利市的公交车上让座而挑战公众舆论的黑人女性)进行了比较。在学生阅读这些选段的过程中,詹森将隐含的内容明确化,使潜在的问题浮出水面。通过这种方式,她帮助学生们为即将到来的辩论做好准备。

She does this in several ways. Two weeks before the debate between loyalists and rebels, she assigns selections from the “Student Handbook on Authority,” a mimeographed booklet that corresponds to the main units of her American history course, a kind of “nontextbook” textbook. Students read a short story, “A Flogging at Sea,” in which a ship's captain beats a sailor. Next they read “Two People Who Make Choices,” a short article that compares Josiah Quincy, a lawyer who defended British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre, to Rosa Parks, a black woman who bucked public opinion more than a century and a half later by refusing to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. As students read these selections, Jensen makes the implicit explicit, bringing underlying issues to the surface. In doing so, she helps prepare students for the debate to come.

辩论前的四节课是“研究日”,学生们分组研读詹森收集的文件、书籍和文章,以帮助他们构建论点。效忠派、反叛派和评委们三五成群地忙碌着,互相传阅书籍,制定各自的策略。詹森在各个小组间穿梭,扮演着教练、问题解决者和监督者的角色,确保讨论的主题是革命,而不是周末的舞会。“那个坐在那里的人……”“他正和他的朋友聊天……我会问他,‘你的东西呢?’ ”她在一次观察中解释道。“他会说,‘我今晚就做,’然后我会说,‘那就现在开始! ’”

The four class sessions just prior to the debate are “research days” during which students work in small groups, studying the documents, books, and articles that Jensen has gathered to help them formulate their arguments. Groups of loyalists, rebels, and judges bustle about, shuffling books back and forth and mapping out their respective strategies. Jensen roams from group to group, acting as coach, troubleshooter, and monitor, making sure that the topic of conversation is the Revolution and not the weekend dance. “The guy who's sitting there talking to his buddy…I'll ask him, ‘Where's your stuff?’ ” she explained during one observation. “‘I'm doing it tonight,’ he'll say, and I'll say, ‘Well, start it now!’”

确保学生专注于学习任务只是詹森工作的一部分。她简直就是一本行走的百科全书、卡片目录和档案馆,以惊人的速度给出建议和提示。“看看第42页的《弗吉尼亚州立法机构宣言》。”她对一组学生说。“你们读过贝利对1763年公告的论述吗?”她问另一组学生。“一定要查看图表,了解《印花税法》中不同印花税票在一天工作量下的实际价值。”她提醒第三组学生。她对美国革命的渊博知识转化为可供学生参考的资料。然而,她从不直接提供这些信息。她总是以提示(“看看贝利对英国东印度公司的论述……”)或问题(“哈克和詹姆逊在这方面有何不同?”)的形式来传达信息。11

Making sure that students stay on task is only one part of Jensen's job. She is a walking encyclopedia, card catalogue, and archive, issuing suggestions and hints at a dizzying pace. “Look at the Declaration of the Virginia Legislature on page 42” she tells one group. “Did you read what Bailey says about the Proclamation of 1763?” she asks another. “Make sure you look at the chart for the real value in terms of a day's work of the different stamps in the Stamp Act” she reminds a third. Her rich knowledge of the American Revolution translates into sources and materials to give to her students. Never, though, does she deliver this information ready-made. She always conveys it in the form of a hint (“See what Bailey says about the British East India Company…”) or a question (“How does Hacker differ from Jameson on this?”).11

小组讨论中出现的问题五花八门,从1770年从波士顿航行到伦敦需要多长时间(大约五周)到开庭陈述是否需要背诵(答案是否定的)。但偶尔也会有学生提出一些无法用一句话回答的问题。例如,在法官席上,七名学生正在研读法理学选段,一个男孩告诉詹森,他担心自己可能会被同伴的论点所左右,但并非是被同伴的论证说服力所动摇,而是被自己对他们的友谊所左右。詹森停顿片刻,思考片刻。她温和地解释说,法官从来都不是生活在社会真空中的。他们必须始终克制自己的情绪,努力将个人偏见与案件本身的优劣区分开来。她说话时,学生们看着她,点头表示赞同。她察觉到他们恍然大悟,便继续讲解下去。

The questions that crop up in the small groups range from how long it took in 1770 to sail from Boston to London (about five weeks) to whether the opening statements had to be memorized (they did not). But every so often a student asks a question that cannot be answered in a sentence. For instance, at the judge's table, where seven students were studying selections on jurisprudence, a boy told Jensen that he feared he might be swayed, not by the persuasiveness of his peer's arguments, but by his loyalty to them as friends. Jensen stopped for a moment and thought. Judges, she gently explained, have never existed in a social vacuum. They have always had to rein in their emotions, striving to separate their prejudices from the merits of each case. As she spoke, the students looked at her, nodding their heads. Detecting the spark of recognition, she moved on.

判决

THE VERDICT

辩论结束后,评委的裁决既是开始也是结束。裁决结束了辩论,但也开启了学生们理解所学内容的进程。詹森的笔记本上记录着学生们的困惑和见解,这些笔记成为了第二天总结讨论的基础。詹森回顾了辩论中的问题,澄清了学生们遗留的误解,并为本单元的最终作业——一篇关于英国税收合法性的学期论文——做好了准备。在论文中,学生们需要构建……总结并融入他们自己独特的见解,将所学知识加以诠释。

The judges' verdict at the conclusion of the debate was both a beginning and an end. The verdict ended the debate but began the process by which students make sense of what they have learned. Jensen's pad, her running commentary on student's confusions and insights, became the basis for a debriefing session the following day. Revisiting the issues of the debate, Jensen clarified lingering misunderstandings and prepared students for the final assignment of the unit: a term paper on the legitimacy of British taxation in which students were to shape, summarize, and place their own unique signatures on the material they had learned.

伊丽莎白·詹森的课堂是个特例。教科书并非教学的主导;教师的讲解不会淹没学生的发言;也没有练习题。学生们参与到一场意义非凡的智力活动中,他们接受与自身不同的观点,并充满热情地进行辩论。通过重现历史,而非仅仅阅读历史,学生们了解到,保皇党并非教科书中描绘的恶棍,而是与叛乱的邻居有着不同世界观的普通人。有时,人们甚至可以看到这种学习过程——疑惑的表情逐渐转变为恍然大悟的微笑。辩论结束后,一个女孩茫然地望着天花板。她缓缓地点了点头。“你知道吗,”她喃喃自语道,“我们本来都可以像加拿大一样。”对于成长于美国而非英国主导世界的时代的青少年来说,意识到如果保皇党获胜,伊丽莎白女王的头像不仅会出现在英国的邮票上,也会出现在我们北方邻国的邮票上,这并非易事。

Elizabeth Jensen's classroom is an anomaly. The textbook does not drive instruction; teacher talk does not drown out student talk; there are no worksheets. Students engage in a powerful intellectual process in which they embrace beliefs not their own and argue them with zest. By re-creating history, rather than just reading about it, students learn that Tories were not the villains depicted in textbooks, but ordinary people who saw their world differently from their rebel neighbors. Sometimes one could even see this learning taking place—quizzical looks turning into smiles of recognition. At the end of the debate, one girl stared at the ceiling, dazed. Slowly, she began to nod her head. “You know” she muttered to no one in particular, “we could've all been like Canada.” The realization that, had the loyalists prevailed, Queen Elizabeth would appear on our stamps, as well as those of our northern neighbors, does not come easily to adolescents growing up in an era when America, not Britain, is the dominant world power.

法官的最终判决震惊了全班同学。保皇派被宣布为胜利者;美洲殖民地没有与英国断绝关系,反而重申了这种关系。学生们等待下课铃响时,保皇派的结案陈词者简直不敢相信法官的判决。他困惑地问老师:“为什么七年级的时候,我们听到的都是殖民地居民突然起义,英国人惊慌失措地四处逃窜的故事?为什么我们从来没听说过这些事?”詹森老师一边听他说话一边点头说:“我也想知道。”

The judge's final decision stunned the class. The loyalists were declared the victors; the American colonies did not sever their ties with England but reaffirmed them. As students waited for the bell to end the period, the closing speaker for the loyalists could not believe the judge's verdict. Perplexed, he asked his teacher, “Why is it that, like, in the seventh grade all you hear about is that all of these colonists all of a sudden were revolting and the British were running in mass terror? How come we're never told about this stuff?” Nodding her head as he spoke, Jensen said, “I'd like to know that, too.”

看得见的老师

THE VISIBLE TEACHER

在离詹森家大约二十分钟车程的一所高中,我们走进另一间历史教室。学校看起来和之前那所差不多——类似的涂鸦,同样破旧的外墙,同样形形色色的面孔。四十出头的约翰·普莱斯老师在黑板、学生和呈马蹄形排列的课桌椅之间来回踱步。他正在讲解《不可容忍法案》。

In a high school located about 20 minutes from Jensen's, we enter another history class. The school looks much the same—similar graffiti, the same shabby exterior, a similar mixture of faces. John Price, a teacher in his early forties, paces between the chalkboard, his students, and the center of a horseshoe formation of desks. He is in the middle of a discussion of the Intolerable Acts.

普莱斯:事实上,乔丹先生称这些法律为第 12 条什么?

Price: In fact, these laws are called, by Mr. Jordan,12 what?

吉姆:不可容忍的行为。

Jim: Intolerable Acts.

普莱斯:不可容忍法案!不可容忍!我们无法忍受!如果你读一本英国历史书,他们会把这些法律称为不可容忍法案吗?

Price: Intolerable Acts! Intolerable! We can't stand them! If you were to read an English history book, would they call these laws the Intolerable Acts?

学生:不!

Students: No!

普莱斯:不!我不知道他们会怎么称呼这些法案,但他们可能会叫它们类似“波士顿法律秩序的必要法律”之类的东西。明白吗?因为他们的视角不同。他们看到的是茶叶的丢失,是私有财产的破坏,事实上,我们今天要做的就是看看这些不可容忍法案的后果。英国人确实派了士兵。萨姆·亚当斯对此欢呼雀跃!他在其中!现在英国人正在做想做的事。波士顿惨案已经发生过了。局势一度平静下来;现在,由于英国人犯下的错误,局势又开始升温。而我们现在只需要一个事件就能再次引爆这一切。现在,又发生了另一个触发事件,第13条,我要让你们读一读究竟是什么引发了这一切。我们将通过阅读两篇写于1775年的报纸报道来进行这项工作。现在,我把它们发给你们。拿一份,然后传给其他人。尽可能快地传下去;它们都一样……这是一篇报纸报道,描述了1775年4月19日发生在列克星顿的事件。由于这些文字对我们来说很古老,毕竟已有200年历史,我将和你们一起朗读第一段,帮助你们入门。仔细听听这些文字的发音。“上周三,4月19日,”记者写道,“大不列颠国王陛下的军队”——这指的是谁?

Price: No! I don't know what they would call them, but they might call them something like “The Laws Essential to Establishing Law and Order in Boston.” You see? Because they see it differently. They see tea being lost. They see private property being destroyed, and, in fact, what we are going to do today is look at the results of the Intolerable Acts. The British do send soldiers. Sam Adams is cheering all this! He's loving it! Now the British are doing exactly what he wanted. We have already had the Boston Massacre. Things calmed down; now they are heating up again, thanks to mistakes made by the British. And all we need now is an incident to set this whole thing off once again. Now, there was another triggering event,13 and I am going to have you read about what actually set it off. And the way that we are going to do this is that we are going to read two newspaper accounts that were written back in 1775. So let me pass them out to you. Take one and pass them along. Pass them as quickly as you can; they're all the same…. This is a newspaper account describing what happened in Lexington on the nineteenth of April 1775. And because the language is old to our ears, 200 years old, I'm going to read with you the first paragraph to get you started on these. Listen to the sound of the language. “Last Wednesday, the nineteenth of April” says the reporter, “the troops of his Britannic majesty”—who is that?

辛迪:国王。

Cindy: The king.

价格:国王。那么我们说的是哪些军队?

Price: The king. So what troops are we talking about?

学生:英国军队。

Students: British troops.

价格:英国军队。“对本省人民发动了敌对行动……对马萨诸塞州人民的敌对行动,其残酷程度丝毫不亚于我们可敬的祖先在荒野中遭受的最野蛮野蛮人的暴行”……英国军队做了什么?

Price: British troops. “Commenced hostilities upon the people of this province…upon the people of Massachusetts attended with circumstances of cruelty, not less brutal than our venerable ancestors received from the vilest savages of the wilderness”…What did the British troops do?

伊莎贝尔:他们对待他们的方式和印第安人对待他们的方式一样恶劣。

Isabel: They treated them as badly as the Indians had treated them.

普莱斯:对待他们的祖先在边境地区的做法…… “具体细节”,也就是与这起让我们卷入内战种种恐怖事件相关的细节,“我们已经尽力收集,但目前混乱的局势也仅能允许我们做到如此。”这段话很长,但他的本质意思是:“列克星顿已经彻底乱套了。简直就像一场内战。”什么是内战?

Price: Treated their ancestors on the frontier…. “The particulars” that is, the details, “relative to this interesting event, by which we are involved in all the horrors of a civil war, we have tried, endeavored to collect as well as the present confused state of affairs will admit.” That's quite a mouthful but in essence what he is saying is: “All hell has broken loose in Lexington. It's like a civil war.” What's a civil war?

苏西:一个地方里爆发了战争。

Susie: A war inside one place.

普莱斯:好的。兄弟相残……现在,在你们阅读这篇文章之前,我希望你们先看一下前面的公告板。在我们开始之前,我想确保你们理解事实观点之间的区别。这是你们在阅读时判断真假的重要技能。所以,我想请在座的各位说出你们想到的任何事实。比如,你们可以谈谈美国革命,谈谈殖民地。关于美国殖民地,我们了解哪些事实?请告诉我任何事实。

Price: All right. Brothers fighting brothers…. Now, as you read this, I would like you to look first, before you start the article now, at the front board. And before we begin this, I want to make sure that you understand the difference between a fact and an opinion. It is a very important skill for you to develop when you are reading something and trying to decide whether it's the truth or not. So I'd like anyone in here to say any kind of statement of fact that comes to mind. Well, if you want you can make it the American Revolution, the colonies. What facts do we know about the American colonies? Give me any fact.

普莱斯和学生之间的交流不到五分钟。他主导了整个对话,说了超过750个字,而他的部分学生只说了26个字。事实上,他在这短短几分钟内说的话比詹森在课堂上三天辩论中说的还要多。一个旁观者如果瞥见普莱斯的课堂,可能会声称看到了其他研究者观察到的现象——教师主导的全班教学,课堂活动都围绕着教师的提问和讲解展开。

The exchange between Price and his students takes less than five minutes. He dominates the conversation, uttering more than 750 words, compared with the 26 words that a subset of his students contributes. Indeed, he has said more in these minutes than Jensen did during the entire three days of the debate in her class. A casual observer peering into Price's classroom might claim to have seen what other researchers have observed—teacher-dominated, whole-group instruction, with activities centered on the teacher's questions and explanations.

但这个教室却与众不同。空气中弥漫着兴奋的气息。学生们身体前倾,提出深思熟虑、发人深省的问题,下课铃响后也留在教室继续讨论。普莱斯老师活力四射——他时而大笑,时而踱步,时而与学生们打趣,时而兴奋地比划着手势。约翰·普莱斯绝非普通的老师,他是一位表演大师,牢牢抓住了35名青少年的集体想象力,带领他们踏上了一段穿越时空的探险之旅。

But something makes this classroom different. The air is electric. Students lean forward in their seats, ask thoughtful and stimulating questions, and stay in the room to continue discussions after the bell has rung. Price is pure energy—laughing, pacing, bantering with students, gesturing excitedly. No ordinary teacher, John Price is a master performer who has seized the collective imagination of thirty-five adolescents and has led them on an expedition into the past.

在简短的介绍性讨论之后,普莱斯老师指导学生们阅读第一篇报纸报道。阅读时,他们需要寻找证据来回答黑板上的一系列问题。学生们安静地独立或与同伴合作完成任务,普莱斯老师则在教室里走动,回答学生的问题。十分钟后,课堂恢复,珍妮老师问道:“这篇文章是谁写的?”

After this brief introductory discussion, Price directs students to read the first newspaper account. While they read, they are to look for evidence to answer a set of questions on the board. Students work quietly, independently or with a partner, while Price walks around the room answering questions. After ten minutes, the class resumes as Jenny asks, “Who wrote this?”

价格:嗯,这看起来像是谁写的?

Price: Well, who does it look like wrote this?

珍妮:一名殖民者。

Jenny: A colonist.

普莱斯:这看起来像是美国报纸,对吧?因为无论你从这里读到什么,英国人似乎都是邪恶的野蛮人……那美国人呢,他们又是怎么被描述的?

Price: Looks like it's an American newspaper, doesn't it? Because it looks like wherever you read here, the British are the bad, evil savages…. And the Americans, how are they described?

珍妮:真好。

Jenny: Sweet.

价格:还有其他问题吗?

Price: Anything else?

珍妮:勇敢。

Jenny: Courageous.

价格:英雄般的他们勇敢无畏,坚守阵地……你看,这段文字是如何精心营造氛围的?那么,你会如何回答第三个问题?这条新闻会如何影响革命?谁会读到它?

Price: Heroic. They're courageous, standing fast…. See how carefully this is written to create a mood? And so, how would you respond then to the third question here? How could this news story influence the Revolution? Who was going to read it?

马克:这可能会让他们都兴奋起来。

Mark: It could make them all hyped up.

普莱斯:这本来会煽动情绪,结果却火上浇油,让情况变得更糟。你能想象吗?这个人或许是某个组织的成员,或者他自己就是自由之子成员?他试图拉拢那些还在犹豫不决、不想卷入其中的人。

Price: It was going to hype people up. It's adding gasoline to the fire. It's making it worse. Can you imagine that this guy was maybe a friend of someone or himself was a member of the Sons of Liberty? Trying to sway those people who are sitting on the fence and don't want to get involved.

谈话又持续了一会儿,直到普莱斯引导学生们完成作业的第二部分,即阅读另一篇报纸报道并回答一组类似的问题第二个记载来自《伦敦公报》,普莱斯在再次仔细阅读文本后,与他的学生们讨论了作者的观点如何影响了对列克星顿战役的第二个截然不同的描述。

The conversation lasts a while longer until Price directs students to the second part of the assignment, which involves reading another newspaper account and responding to a similar set of questions. The second account comes from the London Gazette, and, after another close reading of the text, Price discusses with his students how the author's point of view influenced this second, vastly different characterization of the Battle of Lexington.

审视看得见的教师

EXAMINING THE VISIBLE TEACHER

教学有时被比作表演,而约翰·普莱斯堪称一位杰出的演员——他既能敏锐地感知听众,又能巧妙地运用肢体语言进行交流。他非常了解听众,会提出他们能够回答的问题,将当天的课程内容与他们已有的知识联系起来,并引导他们寻找证据来支持自己的观点。

Teaching has sometimes been compared to acting, and John Price is an actor par excellence—simultaneously sensitive to his audience and a master at using his body to communicate. He is keenly aware of his audience, asking them questions he knows they can answer, relating the day's lesson to what they already know, pushing them to look for evidence to support their claims.

但如果说普莱斯是个演员,那他可是个自编自演的演员。他没有正式的剧本,既不做周密的计划,也不以教科书为指导。相反,他随身带着一个笔记本,里面记录着他十七年教学生涯中收集的各种信息:列克星顿和康科德战役中阵亡的英军人数、毛泽东最欣赏乔治·华盛顿的什么品质、以及关于托马斯·潘恩父亲(一位束身衣制造商)的笔记等等。

But if Price is an actor, he is one who writes and delivers his own lines. He has no formal script, and he neither plans meticulously nor uses the textbook as a guide. Rather, he carries with him a notebook filled with bits of information collected over his seventeen years in the classroom: the number of British soldiers killed at Lexington and Concord, what Mao Zedong most admired about George Washington, notes about Tom Paine's father (a corset maker).

铃声一响,普莱斯就出现在讲台上——回答学生的问题,穿插着笔记本上的轶事,并运用类比和例子来阐明他的观点。正如詹森首先向学生介绍十八世纪的人性观,为宪法的批准奠定了基础一样,普莱斯也在学年伊始就引入了组织框架和概念,从而使学生能够筛选信息,去伪存真。为了讲解《不可容忍法案》,他必须先介绍《汤森法案》、加斯佩事件、萨姆·亚当斯以及通讯委员会。他还介绍了克莱恩·布林顿革命模型的改编版本。普莱斯说:

When the bell rings, Price is on stage—responding to student questions, interjecting anecdotes from his notebook, and using analogies and examples to illustrate his points. Just as Jensen laid the groundwork for the ratification of the Constitution by first introducing her students to eighteenth-century views of human nature, so Price introduces organizing frameworks and concepts early in the school year, thus enabling his students to cull the information presented to them and sort the wheat from the chaff. To talk about the Intolerable Acts, he had to introduce the Townshend Acts, as well as the Gaspé incident, Sam Adams, and the Committees of Correspondence. He also introduced an adaptation of Crane Brinton's model of revolution.14 Says Price:

我希望学生们能看到它,这样他们就能记住……我希望他们从革命中某些必然存在的要素的角度来理解它。这样,当他们将来遇到其他革命时,就能有一些线索可以参考……这样,在我们学习革命的过程中,他们就能列出这些不满——“不满”这个词是我在讲解培根起义时提出的——他们就能理解这个词的含义。他们关注的第二点是领袖人物,这样,当我开始讲解萨姆·亚当斯,或者他们读到约翰·汉考克或其他自由之子成员的故事时,这些就成了另一个线索。

I want students to see it so they'll remember it…. I want them to approach it from the standpoint of certain elements of revolution that are necessarily present in all revolutions. So that when they come across revolutions in the future, they'll have some signposts to look for…so that all the time we're studying the Revolution, they are listing these complaints, and it's a term that I began with Bacon's Rebellion—grievances—they know what that word means. The second thing they look for is the presence of leaders, so that when I start talking about Sam Adams or they're reading about John Hancock or the others, the Sons of Liberty and so forth, that's another signpost.

普莱斯的学生们对他提出的关于事实与观点区别的问题并不感到惊讶,就像他们对普莱斯使用“触发事件”一词并不感到惊讶一样。从学期伊始,普莱斯就一直鼓励学生们去探寻价值观、观点和解读——首先从教科书作者的价值观入手:“我们总是从价值观入手。我们首先想到的是……他们拥有影响其言行的价值观。”这种强调源于普莱斯对历史的理解。乔丹先生在这本教科书里写的,”他说,“那不是历史。人类经验的集合太过复杂,不可能用一个简单的解释来概括所有发生的事情……而这正是历史如此引人入胜的原因。”

Price's students were no more surprised by his question about the differences between fact and opinion than they were about his use of the term “triggering event.” Since the beginning of the semester, Price has pushed students to look for values, opinions, interpretations—starting with those of the textbook authors: “We always start with values. We start with the…notion…that they have values that influence what they say and do.” This emphasis is based on Price's conception of history. “What Mr. Jordan has here in this [textbook]” he says, “that's not history. A collection of human experiences [is] too complicated for there to be one pat explanation as to what happened…. And that's what makes history so exciting.”

普莱斯希望他的学生能够欣赏并认识到历史的诠释性,但他并不想把他们培养成“小历史学家”。他承认学校期望他教授学生一定数量的史实信息,而他本人也重视这些信息,因为它们能赋予学生一种归属感。但普莱斯很清楚,在概览课程中,他无法同时兼顾历史的内容和历史学家重构历史的过程:“我追求的是一种平衡……我的目标是真正激发学生们对历史人物的兴趣……并让他们意识到,发现这些信息的过程本身就令人兴奋……这两点是我始终铭记于心的。”

While Price wants his students to appreciate and recognize the interpretive nature of history, he is not interested in making them “little historians.” He acknowledges that his school expects him to teach his students a certain amount of factual information, information he values because it provides students with a sense of rootedness. But Price is well aware that in a survey course he cannot do justice to both the content of history and the processes historians use to reconstruct it: “I'm seeking a balance…. My mission is to really get [students] excited about some of the characters along the way…[and] for them to realize that there is a real excitement in how this information was discovered…. Those are the two things I constantly have in mind.”

和詹森一样,普莱斯也以“严厉的老师”著称,他对学生的要求比以往更高。但与詹森的班级不同,普莱斯的班级并非荣誉班;相反,班上的学生都是因为普莱斯老师的声誉而选择选修他的课。学生们都明白自己需要努力学习,而且美国历史是一门严肃的学科。

Like Jensen, Price is known as a “hard teacher” one who pushes students more than they have been pushed before. Unlike Jensen's class, Price's is not an honors section; instead, it consists of students who have opted to enroll in his class because of his reputation as a fine teacher. Students know that they are expected to work hard and that U.S. history is serious business.

但在这个课堂上,“学习”并不意味着死记硬背人名、日期和事件,而这在其他许多历史课上却很常见。诚然,课堂讨论中也充斥着人名和事件,但普莱斯介绍的人物并非教科书中那些毫无生气的形象。他们是活生生的人,有血有肉,有自己的怪癖和缺点。萨姆·亚当斯虽然是一位杰出的宣传家,被誉为“革命的笔杆子”,但他衣着邋遢——邋遢到自由之子组织不得不为他买一套新西装,让他出席一次公开活动。约翰·汉考克憎恨《茶叶法》,与其说是因为它侵犯了他作为英国公民的权利,不如说是因为它威胁到了他作为茶叶商人的生计。普莱斯班上的男男女女都……他的动机——有些是个人动机,有些是政治动机——以及他所教授的历史,都是透过这些动机的棱镜来看的。

But in this class “pushing” does not mean the memorization of names, dates, and events that characterizes so many other history classes. True, conversations during class periods are replete with names and events, but the people Price introduces are not the lifeless figures of textbooks. They are living, breathing, feeling human beings complete with idiosyncrasies and foibles. Sam Adams, while a brilliant propagandist and the “Penman of the Revolution” was a seedy dresser—so seedy that the Sons of Liberty bought him a new suit for a public appearance. John Hancock resented the Tea Act not so much because it violated his rights as a British citizen as because it threatened his livelihood as a merchant who traded in tea. Men and women in Price's class had motives—some personal, some political—and the history he teaches is viewed through the prism of these motives.

普莱斯通过让课堂上的人物形象鲜活起来,引导学生思考这些人物的行为。一旦他介绍了故事中的人物,学生们便迫不及待地想要了解这些人如何创造历史。但普莱斯讲述的故事并非完结,它们并非像合订本那样,有着开头、中间和结尾。普莱斯强调,历史学家呈现的是事件的“记述”,而非事件本身。学生们会学习列克星顿和康科德战役,但他们是从英国和美国两个角度来看待这场战役的。他们会学习塞勒姆女巫审判,但也会了解到,近期的史学研究提出了与教科书作者不同的解读。他们会了解到,英国人认为《不可容忍法案》相当合理。在普莱斯的课堂上,结论部分总是令人兴奋,因为历史并非尘封已久的陈旧人物和地点集合。相反,历史是一部故事集,由持有不同信念和立场的人们讲述,其中许多人甚至无法就故事的主线达成一致。

By making the characters in his lessons real, Price engages his students in thinking about the actions of those characters. Once he has introduced the people in the story, his students are eager to hear the tale of how these individuals made history. But the stories Price tells aren't finished; they are not closed books with beginnings, middles, and ends. Price emphasizes that historians present “accounts” of events, not the events themselves. Students learn about the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but they see the battle from both the British and the American perspectives. They learn about the Salem witch hunts, but they also learn that recent historiography has produced interpretations that differ from those presented by the authors of their textbook. They learn that the British viewed the Intolerable Acts as quite reasonable. Conclusions are exciting in Price's class, for history is not a dusty and dated collection of people and places. Instead, history is an anthology of stories, told by people with differing convictions and commitments, many of whom cannot even agree on the story line.

异同

DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES

对普莱斯和詹森的分析提供了一个对比研究。观察普莱斯的教学,我们看到了拉里·库班所说的“持续性教学”——以教师为中心的全班教学,教师引导讨论,点名提问,并在黑板上写下关键短语。 15而詹森的课堂则截然不同;合作小组取代了全班教学;学生的辩论和展示盖过了教师的讲解;教师发布指令和传递信息的声音也几乎消失殆尽。

This analysis of Price and Jensen offers a study in contrast. Watching Price, we see what Larry Cuban has called “persistent instruction”—whole-group instruction with the teacher at the center, leading discussions, calling on students, and writing key phrases on the chalkboard.15 Jensen's classroom, on the other hand, departs from the traditional; cooperative small groups replace whole-group instruction; student debate and presentation overshadow teacher recitation; and the teacher's voice, issuing instructions and dispensing information, is largely mute.

尽管詹森和普莱斯的教学风格和课堂组织体系截然不同,但学生们受到的影响似乎却大同小异。在两间教室里,历史议题都超越了原本整齐的五十分钟课时,在下课铃响后依然占据着课堂讨论的中心位置。当学生们收起书本,准备去上下一节课时,我们听到他们在讨论的不是周五晚上的舞会或篮球赛,而是虚拟呈现和触发事件。两间教室里都弥漫着思想碰撞的氛围。

While Jensen and Price have markedly different styles and systems of classroom organization, the students seem to be affected in ways more similar than different. In both classrooms, the issues of history spilled over the neat fifty-minute periods and continued to dominate discussions well after bells had rung. As students put away their books and left for the next class, we heard them comment, not about the Friday night dance or the basketball game, but about virtual representation and triggering events. In both rooms, the atmosphere sizzled with ideas.

詹森和普莱斯必须掌握哪些知识才能营造这样的环境?显然,这两位老师都擅长组织课堂,而且向学生传达清晰的目标。但这两位老师都是各自学科领域的专家。培根起义、詹姆斯·奥蒂斯、萨姆·亚当斯、乔治·格伦维尔、《航海条例》、驻军条例——这些以及无数其他信息,在他们各自的脑海中构成了严密的知识网络。他们也对那个时期更广泛的概念和理论问题有着深刻的理解。他们可以就虚拟代表制、内部税收和外部税收的区别、重商主义、有益的忽视、自然权利等等问题畅所欲言。

What must Jensen and Price know in order to create such environments? Clearly, both teachers are skilled at organizing classrooms and conveying clear goals to students. But these two teachers are masters of their subject matter. Bacon's Rebellion, James Otis, Sam Adams, George Grenville, the Navigation Acts, the Quartering Act—these and countless other bits of information form tightly organized networks of facts stored in each teacher's mind. Both are also deeply familiar with the broader conceptual and theoretical issues of the period. They can talk at length about virtual representation, the difference between internal and external taxation, mercantilism, salutary neglect, natural rights, and so on.

但每位教师也都拥有更广泛的知识体系,能够为这些纷繁复杂的信息构建框架。例如,普莱斯借鉴克莱恩·布林顿的革命理论模型,将殖民时期的美国与当代南非进行比较。詹森则凭借对殖民时期史学的熟悉——包括查尔斯·比尔德、J ·富兰克林·詹姆逊、路易斯·哈克、戈登·伍德等人的解读——来理解殖民时期复杂且往往相互矛盾的证据。对这两位教师而言,这些更广泛、更普遍的解读框架赋予了细节以意义。在他们看来,历史并非无休止的人名和日期罗列,而是一个充满清晰模式和趋势的引人入胜的故事。

But each teacher also possesses a more general body of knowledge that gives structure to this welter of information. So, for example, Price makes comparisons between colonial America and contemporary South Africa, drawing on a theoretical model of revolution borrowed from Crane Brinton. Jensen makes sense of the complex and often contradictory evidence of the colonial period through her familiarity with its historiography—the interpretations of Charles Beard, J. Franklin Jameson, Louis Hacker, Gordon Wood, and others. For both teachers, these broader and more general interpretative frameworks infuse detail with meaning. To them, history is not an endless parade of names and dates but an intriguing story filled with discernible patterns and trends.

他们在研究对象上的态度有着惊人的相似之处。两人都将历史视为人类建构的产物,一项人们试图解开谜题的活动,即便有些碎片已经褪色,有些扭曲变形难以辨认,有些则湮没在历史的尘埃中。詹森和普莱斯向学生们保证,我们可以了解关于人物、事件和事迹的某些事实,但一旦我们转向意义的问题——探究某件事发生的原因,而非仅仅关注它发生的事实——历史就变成了一种评判行为。

There are striking similarities in their orientation to their subject matter. Both see history as a human construction, an enterprise in which people try to solve a puzzle even though some of the pieces are faded, some distorted beyond recognition, and some lost to the dust of time. We can know certain facts about people, events, and deeds, Jensen and Price assure their students, but as soon as we turn to questions of significance—of why something happened versus the mere fact of its happening—history becomes an act of judgment.

在许多历史课堂上,教科书替学生筛选证据,却从不提及筛选过程中所涉及的解读。但在这两门课上,教科书扮演的角色截然不同。有时,教科书会介入各种相互冲突的解读;有时,它们会作为教师所推崇解读的反面;还有些时候,它们会作为资源,帮助学生理解历史脉络。教科书被视为历史的“记述”而非历史的复制品,它们丰富了学生的理解,但并不决定学生的最终答案。

In many history classrooms, the textbook sifts the evidence for students, never alluding to the interpretation such sifting involves. But textbooks in these two classes played a far different role. Sometimes the textbooks entered the fray of conflicting interpretations; at other times, they acted as foils for the teacher's favored interpretations; at still other times, they served as resources to help students follow the story line of history. Viewed as “accounts” rather than facsimiles of the past, textbooks enriched but did not determine student's understanding.

秉持着对历史和教学的理解,詹森和普莱斯将他们的知识转化为青少年群体能够理解的形式。在将知识应用于教学的过程中,詹森和普莱斯创造了多种多样的学科内容呈现方式——例如,类比、演示、模拟、故事、戏剧重现和辩论。所有这些不同的表现形式都有一个共同点:它们都试图在教师深奥的理解和学生正在发展的理解之间架起一座桥梁。

Working within their visions of history and teaching, Jensen and Price rendered their knowledge into forms accessible to a diverse group of adolescents. In transforming their knowledge for teaching, Jensen and Price created a wide variety of representations of subject matter—examples, analogies, demonstrations, simulations, stories, dramatic reenactments, and debates. All of these diverse representations shared one feature: Each attempted to build a bridge between the sophisticated understanding of the teacher and the developing understanding of the student.

构建教学表征是一种教学推理行为。教师首先必须内省,理解并思考其学科的关键思想、事件、概念和诠释。但在构建教学表征的过程中,教师也必须关注外部世界。他们必须尝试设身处地地站在学生的角度思考,因为学生缺乏教师自身所拥有的那种深刻理解。教学表征的形成,是教师对教学内容的理解以及对学习者的需求、动机和能力的理解的产物。

Creating a representation is an act of pedagogical reasoning.16 Teachers must first turn inward to comprehend and ponder the key ideas, events, concepts, and interpretations of their discipline. But in fashioning representations, teachers must also turn outward. They must try to think themselves into the minds of students who lack the depth of understanding that they, as teachers, possess. An instructional representation emerges as the product of the teacher's comprehension of content and their understanding of the needs, motivations, and abilities of learners.

我们认识到,我们的研究标志着对历史教学中专业知识本质思考的开端,而非终点。还有许多问题亟待解答。专家教师的历史知识、教学知识以及对学习者的了解——这些仅仅是构成教学专业知识体系的复杂认知中的一部分。

We recognize that our research marks a beginning, not an end, to thinking about the nature of expertise in the teaching of history. There is much yet to understand. What expert teachers know about history, what they know about teaching, what they know about learners—these are but pieces of a complex set of understandings that make up the professional knowledge base of teaching.

在描述詹森和普莱斯时,我们遗漏了一些细节,而这些细节对于我们把他们定义为专家至关重要。我们只关注詹森的辩论和普莱斯对列克星敦和康科德战役的讨论,却忽略了我们观察过的其他课程。我们没有描述詹森在课堂上的朗诵,他那洪亮的声音牢牢抓住了学生的注意力,让他们全神贯注地听了五十分钟。我们也没有描述普莱斯的政府课,这门课完全由学生自主组织,他们进行了为期六个月的美国国会模拟,每个学生都扮演一名议员,提出法案,进行幕后交易,而普莱斯则始终隐身幕后。

In rendering these accounts of Jensen and Price, we failed to mention several details that we see as essential in our characterization of them as experts. In focusing on Jensen's debate and Price's discussions of Lexington and Concord, we chose not to talk about other classes in which we observed them. We have not described a classroom recitation by Jensen, whose thundering voice seized the student's attention and held them spellbound for fifty minutes. Nor have we described Price's government class, run entirely by students who engaged in a six-month simulation of the U.S. Congress, each student playing the role of a legislator, proposing bills and making cloakroom deals, while Price remained invisible.

因此,我们以一句警示作结。学科知识固然是教学的核心,但对内容的精通并非衡量教学质量的唯一标准。正如他们所教授的历史并非一成不变、枯燥乏味,詹森和普莱斯也并非只会做好一件事的单一型教育家。两位教师都对诸多事物有着深刻而丰富的理解,这种理解体现在他们能够灵活运用各种教学方法上。事实上,或许正是他们能够自如地切换不同的教学模式,才使他们赢得了“智慧实践者”的美誉。

So we end on a cautionary note. Knowledge of subject matter is central to teaching, but expert knowledge of content is not the sole determinant of good teaching. Just as the history they teach is not static and dull, so Jensen and Price are not one-dimensional pedagogues who do only one thing well. Both teachers possess rich and deep understandings of many things, understandings that manifest themselves in the ability to draw from a broad range of possibilities. Indeed, it may be their very ability to alternate between different modes of teaching that earns each of them the designation “wise practitioner.”

笔记

NOTES

本章由我与苏珊娜·威尔逊合著,最初发表于《Phi Delta Kappan》 70(1988),第50-58页,后经略微修改发表于《历史教师:历史教育学会期刊》 24(1992),第395-412页。该研究成果曾刊登于弗雷德·赫钦格在《纽约时报》 “论教育”专栏(1988年10月12日),其影响力超过了我参与过的任何其他研究。教师评估项目(首席研究员:李·S·舒尔曼)由纽约卡内基基金会资助。感谢卢埃特·麦格劳协助收集本报告的数据,以及保琳·高夫和布鲁​​斯·史密斯,他们的编辑才能堪称一流。

 

This chapter was co-written with Suzanne Wilson and first appeared in the Phi Delta Kappan 70 (1988), 50–58, and in a slightly altered form in History Teacher: Journal of the Society of History Education 24 (1992), 395–412. The research was featured in Fred Hechinger's “On Education” column in the New York Times (October 12, 1988), which generated more attention to this project than to any other piece of research with which I've been involved. The Teacher Assessment Project (Lee S. Shulman, principal investigator) was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Thanks go to Louette McGraw, who helped collect the data in this report, and to Pauline Gough and Bruce Smith, whose editorial acumen ranks them among the best.

 

1. Diane Ravitch 和 Chester Finn, Jr.,《我们的 17 岁青少年知道什么?关于第一次全国历史和文学评估的报告》(纽约,1987 年),第 194 页。

1. Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York, 1987), 194.

2. Maurice G. Baxter、Robert H. Ferrell 和 John E. Wiltz,《高中美国历史教学》印第安纳州布卢明顿,1964 年)。另可参考 Lloyd Kramer、Donald Reid 和 William L. Barney的著作《美国历史学习》(明尼阿波利斯,1994 年)。

2. Maurice G. Baxter, Robert H. Ferrell, and John E. Wiltz, The Teaching of American History in High Schools (Bloomington, Ind., 1964). Compare the more recent collection by Lloyd Kramer, Donald Reid, and William L. Barney, Learning History in America (Minneapolis, 1994).

3. James P. Christopolous、William D. Rohwer 和 John W. Thomas,“学生学习活动年级差异与课程特征的关系”,《当代教育心理学》 12 (1987),303–23;John I. Goodlad,《学校》(纽约,1984);James Howard 和 Thomas Mendenhall,《让历史鲜活起来》(华盛顿特区,1982);以及 Karen B. Wiley 和 Jeanne Race,《大学预科科学、数学和社会科学教育的现状:1955–1975》,第3 卷:社会科学教育(科罗拉多州博尔德,1977)。

3. James P. Christopolous, William D. Rohwer, and John W. Thomas, “Grade Level Differences in Student's Study Activities as a Function of Course Characteristics” Contemporary Educational Psychology 12 (1987), 303–23; John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School (New York, 1984); James Howard and Thomas Mendenhall, Making History Come Alive (Washington, D.C., 1982); and Karen B. Wiley and Jeanne Race, The Status of Pre-College Science, Mathematics, and Social Science Education: 1955–1975, vol. 3: Social Science Education (Boulder, Colo., 1977).

4.教师评估项目是一项研究与开发计划,旨在为教学评估的替代方法生成一系列原型。参见本书第8章。

4. The Teacher Assessment Project was a research and development initiative designed to generate a set of prototypes for alternative ways to assess teaching. See Chapter 8 in this volume.

5.根据本研究开展所在学区的规定,我们在本章初稿中使用了两位教师的化名。自初稿发表以来,“伊丽莎白·詹森”已公开使用其真实姓名邦妮·泰勒

5. Under the terms dictated by the school district in which this research was conducted, we used pseudonyms for both teachers in the original version of this chapter. Since the original publication, “Elizabeth Jensen” has publicly identified herself by her real name, Bonnie Taylor.

6. Thomas Bailey 和 David M. Kennedy,美国盛典:共和国史》,第 7 版(马萨诸塞州列克星敦,1983 年)。

6. Thomas Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, 7th ed. (Lexington, Mass., 1983).

7.为了简洁起见,我们摘录了学生的评论。但原文语言是他们自己的。

7. For the sake of brevity, we have excerpted student's comments. The language, however, is their own.

8. 1765 年 5 月 30 日,弗吉尼亚州议会通过一项决议,表示虽然承认需要向王室缴纳税款,但议员们将自行决定征收税款的适当方法。

8. On May 30, 1765, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a resolution stating that, while recognizing the need to pay taxes to the crown, the burgesses themselves would decide upon the appropriate methods for levying them.

9.埃德蒙·伯克是“虚拟代表制”最积极的倡导者,他认为“虚拟代表制”指的是这样一种信念:所有英国人在议会中都有代表,无论他们是否投票选举议员。伯克宣称:“议会是一个国家的审议机构,其利益只有一个,那就是全体国民的利益。议会的运作不应受地方利益或地方偏见的左右,而应以全体国民的普遍理性所促成的普遍福祉为指导。”参见罗伯特·A·格罗斯,《民兵及其世界》(纽约,1976年),第36页。

9. “Virtual representation” according to Edmund Burke, its most vigorous proponent, refers to the belief that all Englishmen were represented in Parliament whether they voted for its members or not. “Parliament” declared Burke, “is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole, where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.” See Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976), 36.

10.保皇派的说法是正确的。当时英国只有10%的人口拥有投票权,而且包括伯明翰和曼彻斯特在内的许多大城市都没有向议会派出代表

10. The loyalists are correct here. Only 10 percent of the population of Great Britain possessed the right to vote, and many of the larger cities, including Birmingham and Manchester, sent no representatives to Parliament.

11.路易斯·哈克和J ·富兰克林·詹姆逊的作品是詹森学生的必读书目。

11. Louis Hacker and J. Franklin Jameson were required reading for Jensen's students.

12. Winthrop D. Jordan、Miriam Greenblatt 和 John S. Bowes,《美国人:一个民族和一个国家的历史》伊利诺伊州埃文斯顿,1985 年)。这是 Price 课堂上使用的教科书。

12. Winthrop D. Jordan, Miriam Greenblatt, and John S. Bowes, The Americans: The History of a People and a Nation (Evanston, Ill., 1985). This was the textbook used in Price's class.

13. “触发事件”一词源自克莱恩·布林顿的革命模型,普莱斯在年初引入了这一框架,以帮助学生梳理导致美国革命的事件。参见克莱恩·C·布林顿,《革命剖析》(新泽西州恩格尔伍德崖,1952年)。

13. The term “triggering event” is drawn from Crane Brinton's model for revolution, a framework that Price introduced early in the year to help students organize the events leading to the American Revolution. See Crane C. Brinton, The Anatomy of a Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1952).

14.同上

14. Ibid.

15. Larry Cuban,“持续教学:高中课堂,1900–1980”,Phi Delta Kappan 64 (1982),113–18。

15. Larry Cuban, “Persistent Instruction: The High School Classroom, 1900–1980” Phi Delta Kappan 64 (1982), 113–18.

16.为教学目的而创建内容的“表征”是“教学内容知识”的核心。参见 Lee S. Shulman 的著作“理解者教学:教学中的知识增长”,《教育研究者》 15 (1986),4-14;以及“知识与教学:新改革的基础”,《哈佛教育评论》 57 (1987),1-22。

16. The act of creating “representations” of content for the purpose of instruction is at the heart of “pedagogical content knowledge.” See the work of Lee S. Shulman, “Those Who Understand Teach: Knowledge Growth in Teaching” Educational Researcher 15 (1986), 4–14; and “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform” Harvard Educational Review 57 (1987), 1–22.

8

8

时间和空间的皱纹

Wrinkles in Time and Place

运用表现性评价了解历史教师的知识水平

Using Performance Assessments to Understand the Knowledge of History Teachers

与苏珊娜·M·威尔逊

With Suzanne M. Wilson

很少有话题像教师考试那样引发如此多的争议。这也不难理解,因为考试——无论是评估基本技能还是辨别教学专长——都关乎教学中最重要的东西是什么。多年来,全国教师考试(NTE)一直主导着这一领域。NTE是一项多项选择题考试,分为教学法和学科知识两个部分,它将教师的知识水平定义为对错答案的简单叠加,并采用预设的答案标准进行评分。尽管存在诸多局限性,例如与教学实践评价的相关性较低,但 NTE 仍然占据主导地位数十年之久,部分原因在于它易于实施,评分也同样简单。

Few topics spark as much controversy as teacher testing. And for good reason, because testing—whether to gauge basic skills or discern pedagogical expertise—makes claims about what matters most in teaching. For years, the National Teacher Examination (NTE) dominated the field. A multiple-choice test with separate sections for pedagogy and subject matter, the NTE fixed teacher knowledge as a function of right or wrong answers to questions scored with a preset answer key. Despite its limitations,1 not the least of which were low correlations with field ratings of teaching, the NTE reigned unchallenged for decades, in part because it was easy to administer and even easier to score.

20世纪80年代,各种新型教师考试层出不穷。 2这些考试在充满争议的政治环境中兴起,有时被用作分配绩效工资的工具, 3 有时则被用作衡量教师基本技能的手段。 4 尽管在教学中学科知识和教学法已经融合,但大多数考试仍然沿用了《全国教师资格考试》(NTE)的做法,将学科知识与教学法割裂开来。此外,大多数考试仍然要求教师做一些与日常教学实践相去甚远的事情——比如在试卷上涂黑圆圈。

New forms of teacher tests proliferated during the 1980s.2 These tests sprang up in contentious political environments, sometimes as devices for distributing merit pay,3 sometimes as ways to measure teacher's basic skills.4 Most tests followed the NTE in separating subject matter knowledge from pedagogy, despite the fusion of these spheres in teaching. Moreover, most continued to ask teachers to do something—blacken circles on a test form—far removed from daily practice.

这些考试最具破坏性的影响或许在于它们对公众对教师职业认知的冲击。作为政策工具,这类考试让公众认为教师的知识是可以轻易定义和包装的,可以轻易脱离语境并被复制粘贴。正如学生考试强调“基础知识”而非“理解”一样,教师考试也强调“可考内容”而非“核心内容”。无论是有意还是无意,这些考试都可能降低了教师职业在公众眼中的地位。

Perhaps the most devastating effect of these tests was their impact on public perceptions of teaching. As arms of policy, such tests taught the public to think of teacher knowledge as something easily defined and packaged, readily decontextualized and transported. Just as tests for students stressed the “basics” over “understanding” so tests for teachers emphasized “the testable” over “the essential.” Wittingly or not, these tests may have lowered the status of teaching in the eyes of the public.

由于人们对纸笔测试评估教学效果的失望,绩效评估的雏形于20世纪80年代末出现,尽管它在其他行业早已出现。⁵本质上,绩效评估要求人们完成产出某些东西。在教学领域,这意味着要求教师给学生上课、批改学生作业、制定单元教学计划、评估教材、观摩并评价其他教师的教学、参与与其他教师的小组备课等等。绩效评估的评分标准并非基于其是否符合一套标准答案,而是基于其是否体现了专业思维和行动的原则性标准。

Born of frustration with attempts to assess teaching through paper-and-pencil tests, the first prototypes of performance assessments emerged in the late 1980s, though they had appeared in other professions much earlier.5 Essentially, performance assessments ask people to do or produce something. In teaching, this means asking teachers to teach a lesson to students, grade student papers, sketch out a unit plan, evaluate a textbook, watch and respond to someone else's teaching, participate in a group planning session with other teachers, and so on. Performances are scored not by their conformity to a canonical set of answers but by their reflection of the principled standards of professional thought and action.

转向绩效评估并非仅仅是新测试技术的出现,也并非仅仅是又一次试图改进现有测试方法。对政策制定者而言,它象征着教学观念从官僚主义专业化转变。 6在前一种观念中,教师被视为执行上级指令的官僚。他们不会质疑、推翻或根据自身经验或情况调整这些指令。为了确保教师工作方式的一致性,当局采用千篇一律的测试,这种测试不考虑不同的学科和情境。正如琳达·达林-哈蒙德在总结这种官僚主义观念时所写,教师“既不计划也不检查自己的工作,他们只是执行工作”。 7 另一种观点则将教师描绘成技能娴熟的专业人士,他们会深入分析儿童的需求,并考虑学科内容、教学法和儿童发展等因素。在做决策时,教师会借鉴与其他领域专业人士类似的丰富知识。在这种观点下,教师承担着该领域评估和考核的责任。他们制定、实施并评估专业知识和技能的考核。8

The move toward performance assessments was not simply the advent of a new testing technology, yet another attempt to build a better mousetrap. For policymakers, it symbolized a shift from a bureaucratic to a professional view of teaching.6 In the former view, teachers are seen as little more than functionaries who execute the mandates of higher-ups. They do not question these mandates, overrule them, or alter them in light of their own experience or circumstance. To insure that teachers conduct their work uniformly, authorities administer one-size-fits-all tests impervious to different subject matters and contexts. Teachers “do not plan or inspect their work” wrote Linda Darling-Hammond, summarizing the bureaucratic conception, “they merely perform it.”7 The alternative view depicts teachers as skilled professionals who engage in thoughtful analyses of children's needs, taking into account issues of subject matter, pedagogy, and child development. In making decisions, teachers draw on a rich knowledge base similar to the knowledge bases of professionals in other fields. In this view, teachers take responsibility for the evaluation and assessment of the field. They create, administer, and evaluate assessments of professional knowledge and skill.8

这种从官僚主义式教学观向专业化教学观的转变,借鉴了认知心理学的研究成果,并与其兴起相呼应。9曾经被视为安排强化措施以带来“正如B.F.斯金纳所言,数学教学的定义是“将有机体培养成拥有数学行为的人”。如今,教学被视为一项复杂的活动,难以用简单的公式来概括。行为主义的语言已被“目标与行动议程”、个人与社会认识论、知识的转化与表征、式实例化与模式识别能力、心理支架以及认知学徒制等概念取代。这些术语及其所代表的概念体系表明,对教学的评判标准已从记录和统计行为,转向探究特定儿童群体、特定内容、教师的目标与知识以及更广泛的学校社群的需求下,行为的意义和恰当性。认知教学观将思考与行动、深思熟虑与决策融为一体。

This shift from a bureaucratic to a professional view of teaching draws inspiration from research in cognitive psychology and parallels its rise.9 Once seen as the arrangement of reinforcements to bring “the organism into possession of mathematical behavior,” as B. F. Skinner referred to defined math instruction,10 teaching now is viewed as a complex enterprise resistant to pat formulas. The language of behaviorism has given way to “goal and action agendas,”11 “personal and social epistemologies,”12 “transformation and representation of knowledge,”13 “schema instantiations and pattern recognition capabilities,”14 “mental scaffolding,”15 and “cognitive apprenticeships.”16 These terms, and the conceptual systems they represent, speak to the fact that judgments of teaching have gone from noting and counting behaviors to inquiring into the meaning and appropriateness of behavior given a specific group of children, a particular piece of content, the teacher's goals and knowledge, and the demands of the larger school community. The cognitive view of teaching marries thought and action, deliberation and decision.

本章的研究成果来自斯坦福大学教师评估项目(TAP),该项目是最早开发和实地测试教师绩效评估的项目之一。 17 TAP 旨在开发评估原型,为国家专业教学标准委员会(NBPTS)的工作提供参考。NBPTS 自 1987 年以来一直致力于规划一套全国教师自愿认证体系。 18该认证与教师执照在关键方面有所不同。教师执照由各州教育部门颁发和监管,代表了该领域的最低标准。其既定目的是确保新入职教师能够胜任该工作的基本职责。而教师认证则超越了基本技能和入门级能力。它代表着一个“高标准”, 19并非要求所有新教师或所有希望获得认证的资深教师都必须达到。在这些情况下,获得认证将代表着成就,并成为专业卓越的标志。

The findings presented in this chapter come from one of the first projects to develop and field-test performance assessments for teachers, Stanford University's Teacher Assessment Project (TAP).17 TAP set out to develop prototypes of assessments that would inform the work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), which has been engaged since 1987 in planning a voluntary system of national certification for teachers.18 This certification would differ from the teacher licensure in key respects. Licensure, granted and regulated by state departments of education, represents the minimum standards in the field. Its stated purpose is to insure that people entering teaching are competent to perform the basic duties of the job. Certification goes beyond basic skills and entry-level competence. It would represent a “bold standard”19 that would not be expected of beginning teachers, or of every experienced teacher who sought to attain it. Certification in these cases would signify accomplishment and be a mark of professional distinction.

在四年的发展历程中,TAP 开发了中学历史/社会研究和小学数学的实践练习,以及一系列中学生物和小学语言艺术的档案袋评估。 20 本文重点介绍 TAP 开发的三项中学历史/社会研究评估。

During its four-year history, TAP developed performance exercises in secondary history/social studies and elementary mathematics, and a series of portfolio assessments in secondary biology and elementary language arts.20 Here the focus is on three assessments TAP developed in secondary history/social studies.

背景

BACKGROUND

运动发展

Exercise Development

TAP的练习开发始于一系列“实践智慧”研究,这些研究是对11位被提名的历史教师进行的深入调查。教授、学校管理人员和同事教师都称之为“专家”。21这一发展阶段,我们的目标并非像商业试题开发商常用的“工作分析”策略那样,对整个历史教学领域进行调查并从中随机抽样。我们采取更为务实的做法,力求选取那些能够代表优秀历史教师所擅长的有价值的活动的核心理念。

TAP's exercise development began with a series of “Wisdom of Practice” studies, intensive investigations of eleven history teachers nominated as ”expert” by professors, school administrators, and fellow teachers.21 Our goal at this stage of development was not to survey the entire domain of history teaching so that we could randomly sample from it, the strategy of “job analysis” commonly used by commercial test developers. More modestly, we tried to select core ideas that represented worthwhile activities that good history teachers do well.

这显然不是一个中立的过程。我们最终测试组中的九项练习反映了一种受先前理论和实证研究影响的教学模式。这种模式将教师描绘成拥有深厚学科知识,并积极寻求向学习者呈现学科内容的方法的人。它假定教学并非一个通用的过程,因为优秀的教师必须精心构建强有力的表征(类比、隐喻、演示、示例、故事和模拟),以连接他们已知的知识和他们希望学生学习的内容。这些表征的形式和所依据的知识因教学内容的不同而有所差异——数学或英语文学、艺术史或体育。此外,我们测试组中的练习还假定优秀的教学并非遵循固定的形式。根据教学目标和具体情况,教师可以选择讲授课程、组织小组合作活动、指导学生完成个人项目、监督同伴辅导活动等等。22

This was obviously not a neutral process. The nine exercises in our final battery reflected an image of teaching informed by the theoretical and empirical work that preceded it. This image portrays teachers as people with deep subject matter knowledge who actively search for ways to present that subject matter to learners. It presumes that teaching is not a generic process, for good teachers must craft powerful representations (analogies, metaphors, demonstrations, examples, stories, and simulations) that bridge between what they know and what they want their students to learn. These representations look different and draw on different knowledge depending on the content of instruction—mathematics or English literature, art history or physical education. Further, the exercises in our battery assume that good teaching does not follow a set form. Depending on their goals and situations, teachers may choose to present a lecture, arrange a cooperative group activity, act as a coach and facilitator to students doing individual projects, supervise a peer tutoring activity, and so on.22

研究策略

Research Strategy

示例1987年夏天,19位历史教师,他们背景和经验各不相同,来到斯坦福大学参加为期三天的历史教师评估中心实地测试。本文的分析仅限于其中两位教师的表现。我和苏珊娜·威尔逊参与了实地测试数据的收集以及后续数据分析的各个阶段。

Sample. In the summer of 1987, nineteen history teachers, representing a range of backgrounds and experiences, came to Stanford University for a three-day field test of an assessment center for history teachers. The analysis here is limited to the performances of two of these teachers. Suzanne Wilson and I participated in collecting the field-test data and in all phases of later data analysis.

两位入选教师展现出引人入胜的相似之处和差异。以衡量学科知识的常用方法——大学或研究生阶段的课程数量23 ——来衡量,两位教师的水平都属于“高”。一位教师本科主修历史,另一位拥有历史学硕士学位,而且他们都毕业于历史系排名全美前十的大学。由于大多数历史/社会研究教师的本科专业并非历史学 24 ,因此他们的课程设置使得这两位教师成为例外,而非普遍现象。规则。这两位老师的第二个共同点是,他们都在郊区的高中任教,而且都位于中产阶级聚居区。两所学校的社会研究课都采用分班教学,两位老师的学生能力水平也各不相同。另一方面,两人教龄相差近四分之一世纪。埃德·巴恩斯(Ed Barnes)于20世纪50年代完成本科学习;简·凯尔西(Jane Kelsey)则于20世纪80年代完成学业。(两人均为化名。)年轻的老师在来到评估中心之前教了三年书;年长的老师则有27年的教龄。

The two teachers chosen displayed intriguing similarities and contrasts. In terms of the common way of measuring subject matter knowledge—the number of courses in college or graduate school23—both teachers would be ranked “high.” One teacher majored in history, the other had a master's degree in it, and both studied at universities whose history departments ranked in the top ten in the nation. Because the majority of history/social studies teachers major in disciplines other than history,24 their course work makes these teachers the exception, not the rule. A second similarity between the teachers is that both worked in suburban high schools in largely middle-class districts. Social studies classes in both schools are tracked, and both teachers have students from a range of ability levels. On the other hand, nearly a quarter-century of experience separated the two. Ed Barnes completed his undergraduate studies in the 1950s; Jane Kelsey completed hers in the 1980s. (Both names are pseudonyms.) The younger teacher taught for three years prior to coming to the assessment center; the older one had twenty-seven year's experience.

本文的分析仅限于九项练习中的三项:(1)学生论文评估,教师阅读并评价一组学生论文;(2)文献资料运用,教师利用一手资料设计课堂活动;(3)教科书分析,教师评估一本广泛使用的美国历史教科书的节选25这三项练习对比了互动式任务和自主式任务。它们共同体现了整套评估体系的精髓。

The analysis here is limited to three of nine exercises: (1) Evaluations of Student Papers, in which teachers read and responded to a set of student essays; (2) Use of Documentary Materials, in which teachers planned a classroom activity using primary sources; and (3) Textbook Analysis, in which teachers evaluated an excerpt from a widely used U.S. history textbook.25 These three exercises provided a contrast between interactive and self-administered tasks. Together, they convey the spirit of the full assessment battery.

数据分析为了进行本次分析,我们决定不使用TAP制定的正式评分标准,尽管参与评分标准的制定过程对我们的思考大有裨益。评分标准的目的是简化数据;而我们本项目的目标是比分析更大样本量的个人和练习时更深入地理解更小的数据子集。我们在数据收集两年后开始了分析工作。我们每个人都独立地聆听了所有录音,并审阅了与三个练习相关的所有文档。在此过程中,我们互相撰写备忘录,记录我们对所审阅的表演的印象、假设、疑问和担忧。然后,我们逐字转录录音,并互相检查转录的准确性。随着我们从一个练习过渡到下一个练习,我们提出了一系列假设来解释这些表演。然后,我们通过回顾之前的练习并展望下一个练习,寻找证实和反驳这些假设的证据来验证它们。

Data Analysis. For the purpose of this analysis, we decided not to use the formal scoring rubrics TAP had developed, though our thinking benefited from participating in their development. The goal of the scoring rubrics was data reduction; our goal in this project was to understand a smaller subset of data in greater depth than is usually possible when analyzing a larger sample of individuals and exercises. We began our analysis two years after the data were collected. Each of us independently listened to all audiotapes and reviewed all documents associated with the three exercises. As we did this, we wrote memoranda to each other about our impressions, hypotheses, questions, and concerns about the performances we reviewed. We then transcribed the audio-tapes verbatim and checked each other's transcriptions for accuracy. As we proceeded from one exercise to the next, we generated a small set of hypotheses to account for the performances. We then checked these hypotheses by looking back to previous exercises and forward to the next, searching for confirmatory and disconfirmatory evidence.

在分析初期,我们对教师的言谈举止和思维方式常常有不同的解释。我们没有急于达成共识,而是利用这些差异提出了多个、有时甚至是相互竞争的假设。之后,我们重新审视数据,检验这些假设的正确性。随着分析的深入,我们不断补充新的假设,排除一些假设,并对某些假设的可靠性产生新的认识或质疑。

During the early stages of analysis, we often had different explanations for why the teachers talked and thought as they did. Rather than push for premature consensus, we used our differences to generate multiple, sometimes competing, hypotheses. We then returned to the data to see how our hypotheses fared. With each successive pass, we added hypotheses, eliminated others, and gained or lost confidence about others.

在接下来的讨论中,我们将提出我们认为最能解释这两位教师表现差异的假设。本次报告大量引用了教师口头和书面评语的直接引述,而非使用TAP评分标准进行数值总结,因为我们想要阐明的问题并非围绕教师在某项练习中获得了“4”分还是“5”分展开。相反,我们最感兴趣的问题是,这种质量判断是如何做出的,它基于哪些类型的数据,以及它反映了哪些标准。26

In the following discussion, we present the hypotheses we believe best account for the differences in performance of these two teachers. This presentation draws heavily on direct quotations from teacher's spoken and written comments, as opposed to offering numerical summaries using TAP's scoring rubrics, because the questions we want to illuminate do not revolve around whether a teacher received a “4” or a “5” on an exercise. Rather, the questions we find most intriguing deal with how such judgments of quality are made, the kinds of data on which they are based, and the standards that they reflect.26

我们不直接描述教学表现并给出最终评价,而是按照我们回顾的顺序呈现练习,并尝试回顾我们得出最终评价的过程。我们采用这种修辞策略有两个原因。首先,我们感兴趣的是,在进行和报告这种不易被贴上“民族志”或“社会语言学”标签的定性研究时,需要采用哪些不同的论证形式。通过力求使我们的学术工作透明化,我们邀请读者判断我们论断的准确性、合理性和有效性,并就这两位教师的能力和知识得出他们自己的结论。其次,我们认为,分析教学表现数据所需的思维与优秀教师的思维一样复杂。它需要基于多种证据来源做出判断。这些判断无法轻易简化为算法或脱离语境,是教学表现评估中不可或缺的一部分。因此,它们构成了我们所描述的评估的重要组成部分。

Instead of describing the performances and offering final judgments, we present the exercises in the order in which we reviewed them and try to recapitulate how we arrived at our final judgments. We use this rhetorical strategy for two reasons. First, we are interested in the alternative forms of argument called for in conducting and reporting a type of qualitative research not readily labeled “ethnography” or “sociolinguistics.” By attempting to make our intellectual work transparent, we invite readers to judge the accuracy, reasonableness, and validity of our claims and to come to their own conclusions about the capacities and knowledge of these two teachers. Second, we believe that the thinking required to analyze performance data is complex in much the same way as the thinking entailed in accomplished teaching. It requires judgment based on multiple sources of evidence. Not readily reduced to algorithms or easily stripped of context, these judgments are an inescapable part of performance assessment. As such, they constitute an essential ingredient of the assessments we describe.

两位老师

THE TWO TEACHERS

巴恩斯先生

Mr. Barnes

巴恩斯先生五十多岁,教龄二十七年。上世纪五十年代初,他从西海岸一所著名大学获得演讲学士学位后不久,便开始在高中教授社会研究课程。1961年,他在同一所大学完成了美国历史硕士学位。如今,他在旧金山湾区的一所郊区高中任教。他目前为高三学生教授大学先修课程(AP)和普通美国历史,也曾教授过世界地理、美国政府、欧洲近代史和社会心理学。

Mr. Barnes is in his mid-fifties and has been teaching for twenty-seven years. Shortly after receiving a B.A. in speech from a prestigious West Coast university in the early 1950s, he began teaching high school social studies. In 1961, he completed an M.A. in American history at the same university. He now teaches in a suburban high school in the San Francisco Bay area. He currently teaches Advanced Placement (AP) and “regular” U.S. history to high school juniors but has also taught world geography, American government, modern European history, and social psychology.

凯尔西女士

Ms. Kelsey

凯尔西女士年近三十,1983年毕业于一所常春藤盟校,获得美国历史学士学位。在私立学校担任了一年初中社会研究教师后,她进入了一个为期五年的教师教育项目,该项目毕业后可获得硕士学位。在实习期间,凯尔西女士在一所郊区高中任教,该校与巴恩斯先生现在任教的学校类似。第二年,她正式成为该校的教师。在参加实习测试时,她已有三年全职教学经验——一年在私立学校,两年在公立学校——教授过七年级和十一年级的美国历史、八年级的公民课、九年级的中世纪历史,以及心理学和艺术史等选修课。

Ms. Kelsey, a woman in her late twenties, graduated from an Ivy League university in 1983 with a B.A. in American history. After teaching junior high social studies in a private school for a year, she entered a fifth-year teacher education program that awards a master's degree upon completion. In her field placement, Ms. Kelsey taught in a suburban high school similar to the one in which Mr. Barnes now teaches, and became a full-fledged faculty member at the school the following year. At the time of the field test, she had taught full-time for three years—one year in a private school, two in a public school—and had teaching experience with seventh-and eleventh-grade U.S. history, eighth-grade civics, ninth-grade medieval history, and electives in psychology and art history.

练习一:学生论文评估

EXERCISE 1: EVALUATION OF STUDENT PAPERS

描述

Description

学生论文评估是一项时长90分钟的活动,分为两个部分。在第一部分,教师审阅了六篇高中生撰写的论文,这些论文的题目是:“描述并评价导致美国殖民地反抗英国的事件和人物行为”(这些论文是学生在11年级社会研究课上进行的限时测试作业。虽然我们重新录入了论文,但保留了拼写和标点错误)。教师们被带到一间安静的房间,有20分钟的时间思考他们将使用哪些标准来评分这六篇论文。他们还被要求思考“学生的知识水平以及他们普遍存在的误解”。20分钟后,教师们接受了一次面谈,解释了他们的评分标准。在第二部分,教师们阅读了三篇新的论文,并被要求“对每篇论文进行评分并提出对学生有用的评论”。随后,教师们再次接受了面谈,详细阐述了他们书面的评论。他们还被问及帮助学生提高论文写作水平的策略。

The Evaluation of Student Papers was a ninety-minute exercise that consisted of two parts.27 In part 1, teachers reviewed six papers written by high school students in response to the following question: “Describe and evaluate the events and actions of people which led to the revolt of the American colonies against England” (These papers were written for a timed test as part of student's normal eleventh-grade social studies class. Although we retyped the essays, we left errors in spelling and punctuation intact.) Teachers were escorted to a quiet room and given twenty minutes to think about the criteria they would use to grade the six papers. They were also asked to think about “the level of knowledge of the group and the general misconceptions that remain.” After twenty minutes, an interview took place in which teachers explained their grading criteria. In part 2, teachers were given three new essays to read and asked to “mark and make comments on each essay which will be useful to the student.” Another interview followed in which teachers elaborated on their written comments. They were also asked about their strategies for helping students improve their essays.

教师的回应

The Teacher's Responses

巴恩斯先生。巴恩斯先生在采访开始时首先描述了他评价论文的标准。他指出,他会先向学生解释他的期望:

Mr. Barnes. Mr. Barnes began the interview by describing his criteria for evaluating the papers. He noted that he would have first explained his expectations to students:

我会强调,为了获得满分和最高分,他们应该完成题目要求的所有内容。题目要求学生描述并评价导致美洲殖民地反抗英国的事件、行动和人物。因此,他们应该在文章中描述事件并评价其意义。他们还应该提及英国政府的行动以及殖民地居民的行动或反应。所以,这篇文章实际上包含四个部分,他们应该尽力完成所有这四个部分才能获得满分。

I would have emphasized that they should do everything that's asked for in the question in order to receive full credit and the highest grade possible. The instructions ask the students to both describe and evaluate events and actions and people which led to the revolt of the American colonies against England. So, somewhere in their essay, they should both describe events and they should evaluate their significance. And they should both mention events presumably on the part of the British government and actions or reactions on the part of the colonists. So it's really kind of a four-part essay, and they should make a very determined attempt to do all four of those things in order to receive full credit.

巴恩斯先生将他的评分标准概括为:(a) 注重事实的准确性;(b) 对关键事件和人物的描述;(c) 对这些事件的评价;以及 (d) 学生的表达方式。他将第五篇作文(一篇“B”级作文)描述为:

Mr. Barnes summarized his grading criteria as (a) a concern for the presentation of accurate facts, (b) the description of key events and individuals, (c) the evaluation of those events, and (d) the student's mode of expression. He described Essay 5, a “B” paper, as:

一篇相当不错的文章。但到了后半部分,文章在表达观点方面开始显得非常粗糙。虽然文中提供了足够的事实数据和分析,让我相信这位学生对所写内容有所了解,但表达起来却有些困难。尤其令我感到困惑的是,他竟然用“slowed”代替了“allowed”,而且还把英国西印度公司误认为是英国东印度公司。我确信,对于一个高中生来说,这根本无关紧要。但对于一位历史老师来说,这可是天壤之别。

A pretty good essay. Toward the latter part of it, it began to get very crude in terms of the way that the ideas were expressed. There was enough factual data and enough analysis of the data to lead me to believe that the student knew what he was talking about but had some difficulty in getting it out on paper. I was particularly distressed by the substitution of the word “slowed” for “allowed”…also mistaking the British West India Company for the British East India Company. I'm sure to a high school student, it makes no difference at all. To a history teacher, it's all the difference in the world.

以下评论针对的是第二篇作文,一篇评级为“A-”的作文:

The following comment addressed Essay 2, an “A-” essay:

这位学生对事实的掌握非常出色。不过,在事件的顺序和时间顺序上存在一些小问题。我认为,他的主题句可以更有力一些。仅仅用“英国开始对殖民地造成困扰”来引出美国革命的到来未免过于随意,尤其是在后面紧接着如此条理清晰、深思熟虑的事实细节阐述的情况下。

The student demonstrated an excellent command of the facts. There were some minor problems of sequencing, the chronology of events. He could have had a stronger topic sentence, in my opinion. To say that Britain started to become a nuisance to the colonies is rather a casual manner with which to introduce the coming of the American Revolution, especially when it's followed by such a well-organized and thoughtful elaboration of factual detail.

巴恩斯先生对学生论文的评价始终如一。他的评语主要集中在学生的事实和拼写错误、对历史信息的掌握程度、正式和非正式语言混用是否恰当,以及偶尔出现的巧妙措辞和“引人入胜”的观点。

Mr. Barnes was consistent in his evaluation of student papers. His comments focused on student's factual and spelling errors, their mastery of historical information, their inappropriate mixture of formal and informal language, and, on occasion, their success with clever phrasing and “stirring” points.

凯尔西女士制定了明确的论文评价标准。她绘制了一张图表列出了以下标准:

Ms. Kelsey. Ms. Kelsey also laid out explicit criteria for evaluating the papers. She drew a chart listing the following criteria:

(a)表明立场并坚持己见。(提出论点/陈述概括性结论。)

(a) Takes a side and tries to stick to it. (Makes an argument/states a generalization.)

(b)运用以前课程中的具体事实来支持论点。

(b) Uses specific facts from previous lessons to support argument.

(c)所选证据支持该方观点或编造故事。

(c) Evidence chosen supports that side or weaves story.

(d)文章篇幅足够长,可以具体详细地准确回答问题。

(d) Essay is long enough to accurately answer the question in specific detail.

(e)文章语法拼写准确(我能明白你在说什么!)。段落划分清晰,结构分明。

(e) Essay is written with accurate grammar and spelling (that I can tell what you're talking about!). Paragraphing, structured and clear.

凯尔西女士首先指出,六篇论文中至少有三篇反映了学生认为历史只是“人名和日期的罗列”。她推测学生之前的教学“过于注重事实”,并质疑这些论文是否真正考察了学生的知识水平。和巴恩斯先生一样,她最初的评论也集中在她会如何指导学生撰写这类论文上:

Ms. Kelsey began by noting that at least three of the six papers mirrored student's belief that history was a “catalogue of names and dates.” She speculated that student's prior instruction had been “heavily fact-oriented” and wondered whether those essays really tapped what students knew. Her initial comments, like Mr. Barnes', focused on how she would have prepared students for this essay:

我本应该给作文题目提供更多指导,让孩子们明白他们既要描述又要评价。这些孩子看起来水平一般,要同时做到这两点真的很难。这对历史学家来说很难,对一个水平一般的孩子来说更是难上加难。所以我可能会说:“请包含这些事件并解释这些事件”……还会给出一些规则,比如“我希望你们至少包含以下事件中的三个”……“在解释时,你们应该考虑诸如‘这件事主要是政治性的还是经济性的?’之类的问题。”

I would have given some more scaffolding [to the essay prompt] so that the kids understood that they were to both describe and evaluate. These appear to be average-level kids. It's really hard for them to do the two things. It's hard for a historian, and it's really, really hard for an average-level kid. So I would probably say, “Include these events and interpret these events”…Rules like “I want you to include at least the following or three of the following”…“And when you interpret, you should consider issues like ‘Was this primarily political or economic?’”

针对巴恩斯先生所说的“展现了对事实的出色掌握”的第二篇论文,凯尔西女士评论道:

In responding to Essay 2, the paper Mr. Barnes said “demonstrated an excellent command of the facts,” Ms. Kelsey commented:

我觉得这孩子像是那种学习非常努力的孩子。我感觉他好像听懂了什么……认为历史只是一堆人名和日期的罗列……我猜他离开的时候心里想的是:“我写了一篇很棒的作文,我应该得A。”

This kid sounds to me like the kind of kid who's worked really hard to study. I get the impression that this kid got a message…that history is a catalogue of names and dates…. My guess is that the student walked away thinking, “I wrote a great essay. I should get an ‘A.’”

两位老师在评分标准中都侧重于学生是否回答了问题;他们都考虑了学生的拼写、语法和表达质量。表8.1所示,他们给出的分数几乎完全一致。

In their grading criteria, both teachers focused on whether students addressed the question; both took into account student's spelling, grammar, and quality of expression. As Table 8.1 shows, the grades they awarded were almost perfectly correlated.

图像

但这种相似性可能具有欺骗性。尽管两位老师的评分几乎相同,但他们对这些评分的理解却截然不同。当被问及“您对本班学生的理解程度有何总体评价?”时,巴恩斯先生回答说:

But such similarities can be deceiving. Although the teacher's grades were nearly identical, the meanings they gave to these grades were not. In response to the question, “What is your general assessment of the understanding of the students in this class?” Mr. Barnes answered:

嗯,我们一共收到了六篇作文。一篇A-,一篇B+,一篇D-,一篇D+,一篇B,没有C;不过,我觉得如果给这些成绩赋予某种数值系数并取平均值,这看起来就像是一个中等水平的班级……能力分布呈钟形曲线是合理的。

Well, we had six essays. One A—, B+, D—, D+, B, no Cs; however, I think if one were to give those some kind of numerical coefficient and average them out, it looks like an average class to me…. The bell-shaped curve of distribution of abilities makes sense.

对于同样的问题,凯尔西回答说:

To the same question, Kelsey responded:

我感觉这些学生认为理解历史就是死记硬背大量信息,复述一系列事实。他们很少提问,也没有任何解读——只是根据他们目前掌握的信息进行理解。

I get the impression that these students think that understanding history is memorizing a mass of information, recounting a series of facts. There is not a lot of questioning going on, there isn't any interpretation—just based on what I have now.

在他们的回答中,巴恩斯先生侧重于学生的能力,凯尔西女士则侧重于学生的信念和误解。两位老师不同的关注点也体现在他们为练习第二部分制定的计划中,该部分要求他们为三位新学生“提供补习和拓展”。例如,尽管两位老师都认为B学生的作文最弱,但他们的补习计划在语气和内容上却有所不同(见表8.2)。巴恩斯先生表示,他会鼓励这位学生多读书。

In their responses, Mr. Barnes focused on student's ability, Ms. Kelsey on their beliefs and misconceptions. The teacher's different focuses carried over to their plans in part 2 of the exercise, which asked them to “provide remediation and enrichment” to three new students. For example, although both teachers agreed that Student B's essay was the weakest, their plans for remediation differed in tone and substance (see Table 8.2). Mr. Barnes said that he would encourage this student to read more.

我的理论是——这其实并不新鲜——如今的学生写作水平如此糟糕,包括我自己在内……是因为他们除了老师布置的作业之外,几乎什么都不读……他们读书不是为了学习写作技巧,而是为了记住一些考试所需的知识点,好让他们能拿到周末买车的分数,甚至考上理想的大学。但他们根本不关注所给材料的写作风格。而我认为,人们学习写作的方式就是通过阅读。所以,补救措施就是:多读书,写得更好。这就是因果关系。

My own theory is that—it's hardly novel—today's students write so poorly, including this one…because they read hardly anything at all, except for what's assigned…. They do not read for any kind of knowledge about how to write but for remembering a few facts for a test that will get them the grade that they need to get the car for the weekend or maybe even to get into the college of their choice. But they don't pay attention to the style of the writing in the material that they're given. And this, I believe, is how people learn how to write—from reading. So remediation would be: Read more, write better. Cause and effect.

凯尔西女士的看法则不同:

Ms. Kelsey saw things differently:

我重点辅导这个孩子“表达自己的想法”,以及如何更有效地表达……我会引导他如何将自己知道的——脑子里的想法——整理成一个清晰的格式。我猜想,一旦格式更规范,其他方面也会迎刃而解,孩子们就能更好地表达自己真正的想法……从自己的感受开始,因为这是建立自己与信息之间桥梁的绝佳起点……我有时会安排这个孩子和能力更强的孩子结对,或者,如果有机会,我会单独辅导他,了解这种合作方式的效果。我可能还会组织一些小组活动,教全班同学如何列提纲……因为他有很多潜力没有被挖掘出来。

I concentrated with this kid on…“giving yourself a voice” and how can you do that more effectively…. I would work on how to get what you know—what's here in your head—into a format. I suspect that once it was in a better format, other things would begin to fall into place better, and kids could better express what they really know…. Start with their own feelings, start with that because it's a great place to build a bridge between yourself and the information…. I might pair this kid with a more able kid sometimes, or, if I get the chance, work with the kid individually to understand how that would work. Probably do some group work with the class about outlining…because there's a lot of potential here that's not being realized.

图片

除了对拼写和用法上的共同关注之外,给学生B的建议几乎没有相似之处。这些不同的侧重点在他们对另外两篇论文的评价中也显而易见(见表8.3)。巴恩斯的评论并没有针对论文的历史内容,而是侧重于写作和表达方面的通用问题。

Beyond a shared concern with spelling and usage, there is little similarity in the advice provided to Student B. These different emphases were also apparent in their evaluations of the other two papers (see Table 8.3). Rather than addressing the historical content of the essays, Barnes' comments focused on generic issues of writing and expression.

图片

图片

尽管凯尔西并没有忽视作文方面的问题,但她主要关注的是如何提高历史论文的质量。在这一环节,教师无需给论文打分,只需为学生提供建设性的反馈即可。巴恩斯先生选择给论文打分,而凯尔西女士没有,这可能表明他们对这项任务的理解有所不同。对巴恩斯先生来说,这些论文或许是等待最终评估的成品;而对凯尔西女士来说,它们或许是需要修改的初稿。事实上,在三个案例中的两个案例中,她都鼓励学生修改论文并重新提交。

While she did not ignore problems of composition, Kelsey focused primarily on making these better history essays. In this part of the exercise, teachers were not asked to assign a grade, only to offer constructive feedback to the authors. The fact that Mr. Barnes chose to grade the essays, and Ms. Kelsey did not, may indicate different orientations to this task. For Barnes, these papers may have represented finished products awaiting final evaluations, whereas for Kelsey they may have represented first drafts awaiting revision. Indeed, in two of three cases, she encouraged students to rework their essays and hand them in again.

提出关于教师知识的问题

Raising Questions About Teacher Knowledge

作为了解教师思维的窗口,这些简短的描述揭示了什么?首先,一些相似之处显而易见。两位教师都希望学生提出条理清晰、论证充分的观点。两位教师都希望文章体现良好的写作规范。两位教师给出的分数也惊人地相似,即使有差别,也仅有半分之差。然而,当我们跳出这些表象,审视这些教师的表现时,最引人注目的并非它们的相似之处,而是它们之间的差异。

As windows into teacher thinking, what do these brief sketches suggest? First, there are some obvious similarities. Both teachers wanted students to present organized arguments and supported claims. Both wanted the essays to embody principles of good form. Both awarded grades that showed remarkable similarity, varying, if at all, by half-grade shades of difference. Yet when we stand back from these performances, we are struck not by their similarity, but by their difference.

巴恩斯先生以一位拥有二十七年批改作业经验的专家的自信来处理这项任务。他稳步审阅每份试卷,指出事实错误和拼写错误,并鼓励学生多读书以提升写作水平。事实上,巴恩斯先生流畅的批改方式让人想起教师专业知识文献中经常描述的那种程式化的教学流程。 28而凯尔西女士则截然不同,她的批改速度较慢,她的判断也带有保留意见、限定条件和替代假设:这些试卷反映的更多是学生之前的学习情况,还是他们真正的知识水平?如果提供提示和其他辅助材料,学生们是否能写出更好的文章?他们是否能够更好地运用其他媒介来展示自己的知识?凯尔西女士指出,在她自己的课堂上,她会将作文与其他形式的评估(例如制作时间轴和“学习海报”)结合起来,因为很多学生“虽然不太善于用词,但他们的理解能力很强。显然,我希望在课堂上帮助他们更好地运用词汇……但我也会寻找其他方法来帮助他们表达自己。”

Mr. Barnes approached this task with the confidence of someone who has spent twenty-seven years grading papers. He worked steadily through the papers, noting factual and spelling errors and urging students to read more so that they will write better. Indeed, Barnes' fluid approach recalls the kind of scripted processing often described in the literature on teacher expertise.28 Ms. Kelsey, on the other hand, proceeded slowly, and her judgments carried hedges, qualifications, and alternative hypotheses: Do the papers tell us more about student's prior instruction than what they really know? Might students have written better essays with prompts and other supports? Would they have been better able to display their knowledge using other media? Indeed, Kelsey noted that in her own classroom she combines essays with other forms of assessment (such as making timelines and “learning posters”) because many students “don't use words well but they really understand a lot. And obviously I want to help them use words in my class…but I also find other ways to help them express themselves.”

仅凭这些表现很难找出这些差异的根源。在此,我们提出一系列可能解释这些差异的假设。

With only these performances to go on, it is difficult to locate the source of these differences. Here we sketch out a series of hypotheses that might account for them.

假设A:教师对学生和教师的角色和责任持有不同的观点这些表现差异可能是由于……由于教师对自身和学生的角色与责任有着不同的理解,巴恩斯可能会要求学生对获取教师提供的信息负责。如果学生认真听讲,他们就能学到所需的内容。如果学生关注作者的写作风格,他们就能成为更好的读者和写作者。在这种观点看来,教学遵循一条清晰的路径:引导学生阅读优秀的书籍,并让他们专注于作者的写作风格;要求他们在写作作业中展现所学知识;纠正事实和风格上的错误。

Hypothesis A: The teachers hold different beliefs about the roles and responsibilities of students and teachers. These differences in performance may be due to teacher's different conceptions of the roles and responsibilities of teachers and students. Barnes might hold students accountable for acquiring the information teachers provide. If students pay attention, they will learn the content they need. If students pay attention to author's styles, they will become better readers and writers. In this view, teaching follows a straight path. Direct students to good books and focus their attention on the author's writing. Require them to demonstrate their knowledge in writing assignments. Correct errors of fact and style.

另一方面,凯尔西女士可能认为学生在学习和写作历史方面存在困难。他们可能存在一些不完整的概念,需要加以挑战。他们可能不熟悉如何阅读和撰写议论文。他们可能不习惯创新和个性化的思考。在这种观点看来,教师有责任创造一个支持学生尝试自我表达和新学习方式的环境。

Ms. Kelsey, on the other hand, may believe that students struggle to learn and write about history. They may possess incomplete conceptions that need to be challenged. They may be unfamiliar with reading persuasive prose and composing persuasive essays. They may be uncomfortable with innovative and personal thinking. In this view, teachers are responsible for creating environments that support student experimentation with self-expression and new forms of learning.

假设B:两位教师持有不同的学习理论一个相关的假设是,两位教师持有不同的学习理论。巴恩斯先生或许认为学习是通过接触和吸收实现的。只要学生有足够的时间接触学习材料(并被鼓励练习),他们最终就能吸收所需的知识。凯尔西女士似乎认为知识是建构的,而非吸收的,学生在建构历史理解方面需要帮助。

Hypothesis B: The teachers hold different theories of learning. A related hypothesis is that the teachers hold different theories of learning. Perhaps Mr. Barnes believes that learning comes about through exposure and absorption. Provided that students are exposed to materials for sufficient periods (and encouraged to practice), they will, eventually, absorb what they need to know. Ms. Kelsey seems to believe that knowledge is constructed, not absorbed, and that students need help in constructing their historical understandings.

假设C:教师们对历史课程的理解存在差异这些差异可能部分源于教师们对历史课程理解的不同。巴恩斯纠正了一些事实错误,例如将英国东印度公司和西印度公司混淆,这些错误不太可能让大多数学生感到困扰,但在他看来,这些错误“至关重要”。为了确保学生掌握正确的事实,他划掉了一篇作文中的“一大堆茶叶”(学生写的是“殖民者……把一大堆茶叶从船上推下去”),并用铅笔写上了“342箱”。虽然凯尔西女士也纠正了事实错误,但她似乎更关注她所说的“大局”。她将评论的重点放在这些作文缺乏解读和分析上,而不是事实内容本身。教师评论中不同的侧重点可能反映了他们对学生应该了解的历史类型的不同看法。

Hypothesis C: The teachers hold different conceptions of the history curriculum. These differences might be partially accounted for by the teacher's different conceptions of the history curriculum. Barnes corrects factual errors unlikely to cause anguish to most students, such as mixing up the British East and West India Companies, but in his opinion such errors make “all the difference in the world.” Committed to insuring that students have their facts straight, he crossed out the words “a whole bunch of tea” in one essay (the student had written, “The colonists…pushed a whole bunch of tea off a boat”) and penciled in “342 chests.” Although Ms. Kelsey also corrected factual errors, she seemed more concerned with, in her words, the “big picture.” She focused her comments on the lack of interpretation and analysis in these papers, rather than on their factual content. The different emphases in teacher's comments may reflect different beliefs about the kind of history that is most important for students to know.

假设D:教师们对历史知识的潜在理解不同假设C可以被视为每位教师对历史理解的副产品。如果巴恩斯先生认为事实知识和细节——有趣的人物和事件的罗列——才是历史知识的重点呢?如果凯尔西女士更多地思考约瑟夫·施瓦布(Joseph Schwab 所说的历史的“句法结构”呢?例如,历史知识是如何被创造和论证的,解释和论证所扮演的角色,证据的谬误,以及如何运用证据来构建论证?

Hypothesis D: The teachers have different underlying conceptions of historical knowledge. Hypothesis C could be viewed as a by-product of each teacher's understanding of history. What if Mr. Barnes believes that factual knowledge and detail—catalogues of interesting people and events—are the focal points of historical knowledge? What if Ms. Kelsey thinks more about what Joseph Schwab29 called the “syntactical structures” of history: how historical knowledge is created and justified, the roles played by interpretation and warrant, the fallacies of evidence, and the use of evidence to craft arguments?

这四个假设或许可以部分解释我们观察到的差异。但这项练习仅仅让我们对教师的知识、信念和技能领域有了初步的了解。为了拓宽我们的视野,我们接下来将进行下一个练习。

These four hypotheses could account in part for the differences we observed. But this exercise provides only a glimpse into the world of teacher knowledge, belief, and skill. To broaden our vision, we turn to the next exercise.

练习2:文献资料的使用

EXERCISE 2: USE OF DOCUMENTARY MATERIALS

描述

Description

在“文献资料运用”练习中,30位教师有30分钟时间审阅一份包含8篇文字资料和3幅图片资料的资料包,内容涉及列克星顿和康科德战役。文字资料包括一手和二手资料;图片展示了战役的三种不同版本,分别绘制于不同的时期。30分钟后,教师们接受了访谈,讨论他们将如何在课堂上运用这些资料。他们还被要求评论这些资料“讲述了怎样的故事,以及它们与我们国家历史有何关联”。

In the Use of Documentary Materials exercise,30 teachers were given thirty minutes to review a packet of eight written and three pictorial documents about the battles of Lexington and Concord. The written materials included primary and secondary sources; the pictures showed three versions of the battles, each painted at a different time. After thirty minutes, teachers were interviewed about how they might use these materials in the classroom. They were also asked to comment on what “story [the documents] tell and how they bear on our nation's history.”

教师的回应

The Teacher's Responses

巴恩斯先生采访开始了:

Mr. Barnes. The interview began:

面试官:首先,您能否简要描述一下您可能会在教学中使用这些材料的一些方法?

Interviewer: First, could you briefly describe some ways that you might use some of these materials in your teaching?

巴恩斯先生嗯,首先,我不会在普通历史课上使用这些教材。但我可以在AP课程中使用,因为我认为它们的阅读难度对于我教的普通高中生来说太高了。我知道我的AP学生虽然会反对其中的模糊之处以及需要他们做出选择和判断,但他们最终还是能够理解。他们更希望老师直接告诉他们发生了什么,然后他们自己记住就好。

Mr. Barnes: Well, to begin with, I wouldn't use them in my regular history classes. But I could use them in my AP classes because I think the reading level is too difficult for the typical average high school student that I deal with. I know that my AP students could deal with it even though they would object to the ambiguity and to the fact that they would have to make some choices and judgments. They would rather just be told what happened and then remember it for the test.

巴恩斯先生进一步解释说,对于他那些才华横溢的学生来说,文献可以提供“对历史​​研究的真正意义的体会”。

For his able students, Mr. Barnes elaborated, documents could provide “a flavor of what historical research is all about.”

我会首先告诉他们,历史并非总是像教科书上描述的那样简单明了。他们学习的时间越长,历史课上得越多,就越有可能对某些历史事件的真相感到困惑,尤其是那些涉及冲突和分歧的事件,比如动机、原因等等。史学研讨会通常会探讨这个问题。如果他们决定主修历史,那么可以肯定的是,在完成历史学习之前,他们会多次用到这类方法。但即使对于那些不继续深造历史、不选修史学课程的人来说,证据的冲突也蕴含着重要的意义:人们必须能够阅读事件的文字或图片,并判断某些事件的有效性、相对重要性或价值。

I would lead off by telling them that history is not always as simple as it may seem from reading about it from a textbook in terms of what actually happened. And that the longer they stay in school and the more history classes they take, the more confused they may become as to the true nature of certain events in our history, especially events involving conflict and disagreement in terms of motive and causation and so on. This is often explored in seminars on historiography. And if they decide to become history majors, they can rest assured that this type of technique is something that they will use numerous times before they get through with their study of history. But even for those who don't go on and study history at an advanced level and take courses in historiography, there's a good lesson here in the conflict of evidence, that people have to be able to read about events, or to be able to look at pictures about events and make choices as to the validity, the relative weight or merit, of certain kinds of events.

当被问及他将计划哪些课堂活动时,巴恩斯将重点放在了谁在列克星顿打响了第一枪这个问题上:

When asked about classroom activities he would plan, Barnes focused on the question of who fired the first shot at Lexington:

所有学生都可以在课堂上或作为家庭作业阅读所有书面文件和图片资料。然后,第二天我们可以就此展开讨论……哪一方先开火?是殖民者先开火,还是根本无法确定?……还有很多其他方法。你可以使用拼图活动31 ……你可以让孩子们阅读这些资料,然后测试他们能找出两种基本观点和两种基本差异。或者你可以让阅读过所有资料的学生分别做口头报告,讲述他们认为发生了什么以及为什么会发生。你还可以让他们写一篇论文,比如研讨会论文……尝试得出某种结论,说明哪些证据似乎更有效,为什么,以及他们尽可能准确地推断事件的本质……所以,基本上,你可以将内容分解成几个部分,让学生分别阅读资料,然后向小组或全班汇报;或者让所有学生阅读所有资料,然后在课堂上对每份资料进行概括性的分析。先从其中一个开始,然后把剩下的都看完。我觉得它们各有优点。

All of the students could read all of the written documents and the pictorial documents during a class period or as a homework assignment. And then, the following day, we could have a discussion about them…. Which [side] fired first? Did the colonists fire first or was it impossible to know?…There's all kinds of other ways. You could use a jigsaw activity31…you could simply have kids read these and give them a test as to what were the two basic points of view, the two basic differences. Or you could have oral reports, individualized oral reports from kids who have read all of these, what they think happened and why they think it happened. You could have a paper, like a seminar paper…trying to reach some kind of conclusion as to what evidence seems more valid and why and their conclusion about the nature of events as near as they can determine…. So basically it's either break it up into component parts with individual students taking documents and reporting either to groups or to the whole class, or all students reading all documents and then a generalized dissection of each one during class time. Just start with one and go through the rest of them. I think they both have merit.

当被问及如果有些学生不理解文件的要点他会怎么做时,巴恩斯先生说他会采用“传统的教学方法。如果他们猜不出来,我就告诉他们。”

When asked what he would do if some students didn't understand the main points of the documents, Mr. Barnes said he would use the “good old didactic approach. If they can't guess, I'll tell them.”

凯尔西女士。巴恩斯先生则专注于他最优秀的学生。凯尔西女士为不同能力水平的学习者开发了这些文件的多种用途。她说,这些文件提供了

Ms. Kelsey. Mr. Barnes focused on his most able students. Ms. Kelsey generated multiple uses of these documents for learners at various ability levels. She said that the documents offer

这是一种绝妙的方式,能让孩子们开始从历史的角度思考究竟发生了什么……这不仅能锻炼他们的精确性,还能让他们思考我们对历史的解读会如何受到我们自身观点的影响。[这]也是让孩子们接触当时的语言和人们的认知的好方法。让他们真正深入其中,仔细琢磨,并且……首先要培养一些关键技能,以便判断事情的真相。同时也要探究不同说法之间的差异及其原因。[其中一个目的]让我眼前一亮的是历史诠释以及随着时间推移,我们的诠释中出现的偏见问题……我会从不同的观点入手,探讨每种观点如何运用偏见来论证自身……这里也蕴含着一个情感目标,那就是让学生真正沉浸其中,亲身体验……我会鼓励孩子们这样做,思考他们自身对所处世界的认知。这与当今新闻报道中的偏见问题有着很好的联系。这也可以成为他们记录自身经历的练习……如果要给技能层级排序,我认为这项技能的难度略低于评估偏见,具体从哪里入手则取决于学生的水平。对他们中的很多人来说,语言理解能力很模糊,不够精确,这种答案可以蒙混过关,勉强拿到及格分,但却无法真正深入地展现事件真相。对于水平较低的学生,我可能会让他们思考一会儿。哪份文件能最详细地讲述事件的真相……我可以结合一个练习,让他们对某个事物进行解释。而对于能力很强的学生——实际上,我可以采用多种方式,将作业分成几个难度级别——我会鼓励他们引用文件内容,并尝试展开论证。如果是AP学生,这将是一个很棒的基于文件的分析题(DBQ)。

a fabulous way to get the kids to start to think historically about what really happened…. It's a good exercise in precision and certainly in point of view on how our interpretations of history would be altered by our points of view upon it. [It would] be a great way to get kids to work with the language of the time and the perceptions that people had. To really get down and mess with it, and start working on some critical skills in determining what really happened. But also how each account might vary and why. [One purpose] that just jumps out at me is the question of historical interpretation and bias that appears in our interpretations over time…. I'd start with the points of view and how each point of view uses bias to make its case…. There's an affective goal there, too, that the students should really get in and really experience that as well…. I would encourage kids to do that, to think about their own perceptions of reality in the world they experience. It could be a wonderful tie-in to the contemporary bias in journalism. It could also be an exercise in recording precisely what they have experienced…. If I were going to think about a hierarchy of skill, I think it's a little lower on the hierarchy than trying to assess bias, and it would depend on the level of my kids where I'd start working. For a lot of them, their sense of language is so fuzzy and imprecise, something that you can slide past the teacher and get an okay grade on, rather than giv[ing] people a juicy sense of what happened. With a lower level set of kids, I might just let them think for awhile. Which [document] really tells you with the most detail what really happened…. I could couple that with an exercise where they build an explanation of something. And then with very able students—no, actually, I could do this in a variety of ways and make the assignment in a couple of tiers—I might encourage kids to then quote from documents and try to develop an argument. It would be a great DBQ [Document-Based Question] if it were AP kids.

在凯尔西女士看来,这些文献展现了丰富的课程和教学可能性(见表8.4)。她同意巴恩斯先生的观点,即原始文献对大多数学生来说都是挑战,但她对这种挑战在教学上的意义持有不同看法。文献带来的问题会让巴恩斯先生望而却步,他只会将其用于能力最强的学生。而凯尔西女士则会将其用于所有学生,并根据学生不同的能力、经验和兴趣,设计不同“层次”的活动。她对文献给低水平学生、高水平学生甚至教师带来的困难都心知肚明(正如她下文的评论所表明的那样)。但她相信,如果教师首先“搭建桥梁”,让学习者能够接触到历史的原始素材,那么学生就能克服这些困难。

To Ms. Kelsey, these documents presented a range of curricular and pedagogic possibilities (see Table 8.4). She agreed with Mr. Barnes that original documents challenge most students but disagreed about the instructional implications of this challenge. The problems posed by documents would deter Mr. Barnes from using them except with his most able students. Ms. Kelsey, on the other hand, would use them with all students, but would craft activities at different “tiers” for students of varied abilities, experiences, and interests. She held no illusions about the difficulties documents pose for lower-level students, higher-level students, and even teachers (as her comments below attest). But she believed that students can overcome these difficulties if teachers first “build bridges” that allow learners to engage with the raw material of history:

第一天,我会先安排一个练习,练习内容是关于精准观察……我会先搭建一个桥梁,然后谈论一些时事新闻……我会结合学生的个人经历:比如,你今天早上起床后发生了什么?上周我们参加的集会发生了什么?诸如此类,一些我们可以讨论的话题。其他孩子可能会读报纸或看新闻……我会以此为桥梁,回到我们之前讲过的目击者证词,我会先分析每个证词的内容,然后让他们逐条讨论。就像我刚才做的那个练习一样。我会让他们讨论文件的内容。他们必须总结自己确定的事实。区分事实和推断相当有难度……我参加过一个研讨会,看到很多老师在这方面都磕磕绊绊,如果我们都做不到,我知道孩子们肯定也做不到……我会让他们合作……也许可以两人一组。最多三个。这……相当有挑战性,有些孩子可能很难总结文件的内容。但我认为几乎每个人都能问一两个问题,而且这很有趣。所以我会一步步讲解,和孩子们一起深入理解,让他们做一个图表。然后我会分析谁更值得信任。我会添加一些英国方面的文件,这样你就可以真正深入其中,再次体验。你可以让孩子们进行角色扮演……我会以一篇作文作为活动的总结。

The very first day I would start with an exercise that does talk about precise observation…. I would start by building a kind of a bridge and I would talk about something in contemporary events…. [I'd] work with [student's] own personal experience: What happened this morning when you got out of bed? When we had the assembly last week that we all went to? Something like that, something that we could discuss. Other kids read the newspaper or watch the news…. I'd use that as my bridge and I'd go back to this episode where we have these eyewitness accounts, and I would start by looking at what each account said and I would probably have them go through something like [the exercise] I just went through. I would have them talk about what the documents said. They have to summarize the facts that they know for sure. That's pretty hard work there, the difference between a fact and an inference…. I was in a seminar where I saw a bunch of teachers stumbling over that, and if we stumble, I know that the kids will…. I would have them cooperate…partners, perhaps, comes to mind. Three at the most. This is…pretty intense, and certain kids are going to have trouble summarizing what the document said. But just about everybody I think can usually ask a question or two, and they're pretty fun. So I would go through that, and I would really build that with the kids and have them build a kind of chart. Then I would analyze who can you trust more. I would add some more documents from the British point of view and then you could really get in and re-experience that some more. You could have the kids enact them…. I would culminate the activity with an essay of some kind.

查阅文件,重新审视假设

DOCUMENTS STUDIED, HYPOTHESES REVISITED

两位老师的教学计划中,学生都需要阅读和讨论文献资料。他们可能会进行辩论,也会进行一些写作。巴恩斯先生计划布置学生将文献资料作为家庭作业,或者在课堂阅读作业中使用。学生阅读文献后,会在课堂上进行讨论,或者互相汇报。

In both teacher's plans, students would read and discuss documents. They might engage in debate and would do some kind of writing. Mr. Barnes planned to send students off to work with documents as homework, or perhaps use them during an in-class reading assignment. After students read the documents they would discuss them in class or report back to each other.

图片

凯尔西女士的出发点则有所不同。列克星顿战役发生在很久以前,学生们可能难以理解。将个人经历与过去联系起来。或许她需要从更直接的事物入手——比如学生自身的经历,或者他们在电视上看到的内容。此外,学生和成年人一样,难以区分事实和推论,可能需要审视自己的假设。他们或许需要练习如何质疑证据的可靠性。鉴于这些材料的复杂性,她会将学生分成小组,并布置一系列任务,以便所有学生都能参与其中。

Ms. Kelsey began with a different set of premises. The Battle of Lexington took place a long time ago, and students might have difficulty making personal connections to the past. Perhaps she would need to begin with something more immediate—either student's own experiences or something they have seen on television. Moreover, students, like adults, have trouble distinguishing fact from inference and may need to examine their assumptions. They might need practice in asking questions about the trustworthiness of evidence. Because of the complexity of these materials, she would put students into small groups and provide them with a range of tasks so that all students could participate.

两位老师都认真思考了如何在课堂上使用教学材料。她们都考虑到了学生的能力和学科内容。那么,为什么她们对这些材料的用途以及可能使用的活动类型却有如此不同的看法呢?

Both teachers thought hard about using documents in their classrooms. Both took into account student abilities and subject matter. Why, then, did they think so differently about the purposes of these documents and the kinds of activities they might use?

在第一次练习之后,我们推测两位老师可能对历史知识持有不同的理解(假设D):巴恩斯先生认为历史主要关乎事实,而凯尔西女士则认为历史具有解释性和视角性。但在这里,两位老师的观点却出奇地相似。巴恩斯先生曾说过,历史“涉及大量事实的筛选、大量数据的解读,然后做出尽可能合理的推测”,并将这一过程比作“引人入胜的侦探故事”。这些评论为假设D提供了新的视角。两位老师似乎都认识到历史知识的解释性本质、证据的核心地位以及视角的影响。从这个意义上讲,两位老师的观点比我们最初预想的更为相似。

After the first exercise, we speculated that the two teachers might hold different conceptions of historical knowledge (Hypothesis D), with Mr. Barnes seeing history as primarily about facts and Ms. Kelsey seeing it as interpretative and perspectival. But here the two teachers sounded alike. At one point, Mr. Barnes remarked that history “involves a lot of sifting of facts, a lot of interpretation of data, and then making the best educated guess possible” likening the process to a “fascinating detective story.” These comments shed new light on Hypothesis D. It seems that both teachers recognize the interpretative nature of historical knowledge, the centrality of evidence, and the influence of point of view. In this sense there is greater similarity in the teacher's views than we originally thought.

尽管巴恩斯和凯尔西对历史知识的复杂性可能持有相似的观点,但他们对学校历史的本质却持有不同的看法(假设C)。巴恩斯先生似乎将学校历史分为两种:一种是面向普通学生的、包含事实和事件的历史;另一种是面向立志上大学的学生的、包含事实和事件,但同时又包含对历史知识诠释性方面的理解的历史。因此,教学计划就变成了一个匹配过程,教师首先判断学生的能力,然后找到学生能够掌握的材料。历史知识由事实和诠释两部分组成。事实知识先于诠释知识,而根据巴恩斯先生的说法,能力较弱的学生可能永远无法接触到历史的诠释性层面。

Although Barnes and Kelsey may hold parallel views about the complexity of historical knowledge, they differ in their beliefs about the nature of school history (Hypothesis C). Mr. Barnes seems to think of school history in two ways: a history of facts and events for average students; and a history of facts and events, with some understanding of the interpretative aspects of historical knowledge, for the college-bound. Instructional planning, then, becomes a matching process in which teachers make judgments about student's ability and then locate materials students can handle. Knowledge of history comes in blocks of facts and interpretations. Factual knowledge precedes knowledge of interpretation, and less able students, according to Mr. Barnes, may never reach the interpretative side of the subject.

尽管她就读的高中也按能力分班,但凯尔西女士对历史课程有着不同的看法。她认为她本科学习的历史与她现在就读的历史之间有着密切的联系。她教的是青少年。在她看来,事实知识和诠释密不可分,二者交织在一起,无法分割。当然,凯尔西会根据学生的能力调整作业和活动,但这些调整都服务于一个共同的目标——让所有学生都参与到诠释历史的过程中来。

Though her high school also tracks by ability, Ms. Kelsey embraces a different view of the history curriculum. She sees a close connection between the history she studied as an undergraduate and the history she teaches adolescents. In her view, factual knowledge and interpretation are bound together, so interwoven that it is impossible to disentangle the two. To be sure, Kelsey modifies her assignments and activities according to her student's ability, but these variations serve a common goal—engaging all students in the process of interpreting the past.

我们从本次练习中进一步看到了对假设B(学习理论)的支持。与之前的练习一样,巴恩斯先生多次提及接触/吸收学习理论。学生只要认真聆听并注意教师“呈现”、“传达”和“讲述”的主题,就能学习。另一方面,凯尔西女士则反复强调建立历史与学生生活之间的联系,以及创造情境帮助学生理解过去与现在的关联。然而,我们很难说这些差异源于教师对学习的信念,还是源于他们对历史知识的概念化(假设D),因为两者往往相辅相成。如果知识是预先包装好的,那么教学就很简单:只需把这些“包装”传递给学生即可。但如果知识是动态的,教师就不能简单地传授预先包装好的事实,因为理解这些“事实”在很大程度上取决于理解它们所嵌入的不断变化的解释框架。

We see further support in this exercise for Hypothesis B (learning theories). As in the previous exercise, Mr. Barnes made numerous references to an exposure/absorption theory of learning. Students learn if they listen and pay attention to the topics teachers “present” “get across” and “tell.” Ms. Kelsey, on the other hand, repeatedly emphasized the building of connections between history and student's lives, and the need to create situations that help students see the relevance of past to present. Yet it is difficult to say whether these differences stem from teacher's beliefs about learning or conceptualizations of historical knowledge (Hypothesis D), for the two go hand-in-hand. If knowledge comes prepackaged, teaching is straightforward: Just deliver the packages. But if knowledge is dynamic, teachers cannot simply hand over prepackaged facts, for understanding these “facts”rests in no small measure on understanding the ever-shifting interpretative frameworks in which they are embedded.

这项练习的数据也有助于我们扩展假设A(角色与职责)。在分析凯尔西女士的教学计划时,我们注意到她的学生也会阅读文献资料,但她会先示范如何质疑这些文献。她会引导他们理清错综复杂的史学脉络,因为她深知他们很容易迷失方向。另一方面,巴恩斯先生的学生可能会把阅读文献作为家庭作业或在课堂上使用,但无论哪种方式,他们几乎不会为这项作业做任何准备。巴恩斯先生假定学生会自行探索文献;而凯尔西女士则认为,为学生提供理解文献的途径是她的责任。

Data from this exercise also help us to expand Hypothesis A (roles and responsibilities). In analyzing Ms. Kelsey's plans, we noted that her students would also read documentary materials, but first she would model for them how she might question the documents. She would lead them through the tangle of historiography, knowing full well how easily they can lose the trail. Barnes' students, on the other hand, might read documents for homework or use them during class, but either way, they would receive little preparation for the assignment. Mr. Barnes assumes that students will navigate their own way through the documents; Ms. Kelsey assumes that it is her responsibility to provide stepping-stones along the route.

基于这些数据,我们提出了另一个假设。我们在此次实验中发现的差异,或许与其说是学习理论或角色观念的差异,不如说是教师教学内容知识的差异。这种教学内容知识是学科知识与学习者知识的交汇点,李·舒尔曼(Lee Shulman) 32将其描述为“教师的独特领域”(我们将这种可能性称为假设E)。教学内容知识的本质在于转化,即教师将学科知识转化为能够弥合已知与未知之间鸿沟的表征的过程。他们希望学生们能学到东西。我们注意到巴恩斯先生的教学计划只有几处改动而凯尔西女士的教学计划则在内容上进行了多种多样的调整。

Still another hypothesis emerges from these data. The differences we found in this exercise might have less to do with theories of learning or conceptions of role than with differences in teacher's pedagogical content knowledge, the intersection of subject matter knowledge and knowledge of learners that Lee Shulman32 characterized as the “unique province of teachers” (We refer to this possibility as Hypothesis E.) The essence of pedagogical content knowledge is transformation, the process by which teachers turn their subject matter knowledge into representations that bridge the chasm between what they know and what they want their students to learn. We noted only a few transformations in Mr. Barnes' plan. Ms. Kelsey's plans, on the other hand, displayed varied transformations of content.

教学内容知识也包括教师预测学习内容对学习者而言可能难易程度的能力。巴恩斯先生意识到这些材料的难度,因此只允许AP学生使用,但他似乎并未意识到这些材料对能力强的学生——即使是那些SAT成绩高、GPA好、学科成绩优异的学生——也构成了巨大的挑战。相比之下,凯尔西女士指出,即使是教师也可能在处理这些材料时遇到困难。为了简化任务,她会删除重复的材料,并将学生分成两人或三人小组进行合作学习。33

Pedagogical content knowledge also embraces teacher's ability to anticipate content likely to prove difficult or easy for learners. Aware of the difficulty of these materials, Mr. Barnes restricted their use to AP students, but he showed little awareness of the formidable challenges these documents present to able students—even those with high SAT scores, good grades, and high scores on subject matter achievement tests. In contrast, Ms. Kelsey noted that even teachers can have trouble with documents. To simplify the task, she would eliminate redundant documents and arrange students into pairs or trios to work collaboratively.33

我们不禁思考,对教学内容知识的关注本身是否体现了更深层次的问题。因此,我们重新审视并修正了假设D(历史知识)。巴恩斯是否可能因为没有意识到准备活动所带来的智力挑战而没有进行相关设计?同样地,凯尔西是否因为作为历史学家,比巴恩斯更关注语言倾向、偏见和视角转换等问题,所以才设计了相关活动?事实上,凯尔西会核实证据、推测文献的来源、提出多个相互竞争的假设,并提炼出能够捕捉证据模式的主题,而巴恩斯先生却只谈到了文献中的一个维度:谁先开枪的争论。尽管巴恩斯和凯尔西可能都将历史视为“侦探工作”,但至少在这个例子中,凯尔西似乎是一位更精明的侦探。

We wonder whether the focus on pedagogical content knowledge is itself a manifestation of something still deeper. And so, we revisit and recast Hypothesis D (historical knowledge). Is it possible that Barnes did not plan preparatory activities because he was not aware of the intellectual challenges they presented? Correspondingly, did Kelsey craft activities on slanted language, bias, and perspective-taking because she was more attuned to these aspects, qua historian, than Barnes? Indeed, whereas Kelsey corroborated evidence, speculated about the origins of documents, raised multiple competing hypotheses, and generated themes that captured patterns in the evidence, Mr. Barnes talked only of a single dimension in the documents: the dispute over who fired the first shot. Although Barnes and Kelsey may both view history as “detective work,” Kelsey appears—at least in this exercise—to be the shrewder detective.

我们意识到,造成这些差异还有其他原因。或许凯尔西女士更加努力,或许巴恩斯先生只是粗略浏览文件,而没有仔细阅读。我们无法从现有数据中得知这些。因此,我们将这组假设带到第三个也是最后一个练习中。

We recognize that there are other ways to account for these differences. Perhaps Ms. Kelsey tried harder. Perhaps Mr. Barnes skimmed documents instead of reading them carefully. We cannot know this from our data. And so we bring our set of hypotheses to the third and final exercise.

练习3:教材分析

EXERCISE 3: TEXTBOOK ANALYSIS

描述

Description

在三个小时的教材分析练习中,34位教师评估了保罗·托德和默尔·柯蒂斯广为使用的《美国民族的崛起》一书中的一段节选。35我们要求他们设想这本书的内容。一个城市学区正在考虑采用该方案,他们的任务是

During the three hours of the Textbook Analysis Exercise,34 teachers evaluated a selection from Paul Todd and Merle Curtis' widely used Rise of the American Nation.35 We asked them to imagine that the book was being considered for adoption by an urban school district and that their task was to

提供坦诚的评价……思考以下几个方面:教科书所呈现的历史的可靠性、该书对学生的吸引力、写作质量、该书作为提高社会研究技能的工具的潜力、该书对不同类型学生的适用性、其总体优势和劣势,以及任何其他与该书可能被采用相关的信息。

provide a candid review…. Think about such aspects as the soundness of the history the textbook presents, the book's appeal to students, the quality of the writing, the book's potential as a tool for enhancing social studies skills, the book's appropriateness for different kinds of students, its general strengths and weaknesses, and any other information relevant to its possible adoption.

为了使分析更有针对性,教师们被要求重点关注美国革命的三个子主题:(a) 少数族裔和女性的角色;(b) 波士顿惨案;(c) 税收和代表权问题。教师们收到了选定的文本、配套教师手册的节选(包括现成的练习题和测试示例)以及一份包含问题和充足答题空间的答题表。示例问题包括:“就历史学的最新研究成果而言,该文本如何?”“不同阅读水平的学生可能会对文本有何反应?” “该文本是否适合历史/社会研究课堂中使用的不同教学方式?”一系列简短的问题引导教师关注文本的特定部分。本次练习不包含访谈环节。

To provide a focus for the analysis, teachers were asked to give special consideration to three subtopics of the American Revolution: (a) the role of minorities and women; (b) the Boston Massacre; and (c) the issue of taxation and representation. Teachers received the text selection, a short excerpt from the accompanying teacher's manual (including examples of ready-made worksheets and tests), and a response form with questions and ample space to write answers. Sample questions included the following: “How does the text measure up with regard to recent scholarship in history?” “How might students of different reading levels react to the text?” “How appropriate is the text for the different types of teaching styles used in history/social studies classrooms?” A series of shorter questions directed teachers to specific sections of the text. This exercise did not include an interview component.

教师的回应

The Teacher's Responses

最基本的一点是,两位教师的写作量不同:凯尔西女士写了1892个字,巴恩斯先生写了1001个字。然而,我们意识到,回答的字数并不等同于回答的深度或广度。 36在分析教师的回答时,我们发现他们在以下几个方面存在分歧:(a) 文本所呈现的历史的可靠性;(b) 这本书对学生理解的影响;(c) 教师手册中练习题和活动的教学实用性。

At the most basic level, the two teachers differed in how much they wrote: 1,892 words for Ms. Kelsey, 1,001 words for Mr. Barnes. We were aware, however, that length of response is not equivalent to depth or breadth of response.36 In analyzing the teacher's responses, we found that they disagreed on (a) the soundness of the history presented by the text, (b) the book's effect on student understanding, and (c) the pedagogical usefulness of the worksheets and activities in the teacher's manual.

文本的历史可靠性在评估文本的历史可靠性时,尤其是在其与妇女和少数族裔历史的关联性方面,巴恩斯先生写道:

Historical soundness of the text. In evaluating the historical soundness of the text, particularly as it applied to the history of women and minorities, Mr. Barnes wrote:

我认为,本书对少数族裔和妇女在革命中的作用进行了严谨的历史论述,其对这两个群体的关注程度超过了我目前使用的其他教材。我之前使用过的任何教材都没有像《崛起》一书那样,用整整两段篇幅来论述“革命中的妇女”……而且,就《崛起》一书所涵盖的三个子主题而言,我也没有发现任何近期学术研究忽略了其他相关成果。

I believe that the text presents sound history concerning the role of minorities and women in the Revolution, surpassing the texts I currently use in the amount of attention devoted to these two groups. No text I have used before devoted as much as the two entire paragraphs in Rise allotted to “Women in the Revolution”…I know of no recent scholarship which is neglected in Rise concerning the three subtopics.

凯尔西女士对此表示反对:

Ms. Kelsey disagreed:

这不过是些老生常谈的煽动性言论,带有典型的白人男性政治史偏见。令人失望的是,书中对近期研究成果的提及如此之少,尤其是像南希·科特(Nancy Cott 关于殖民地女性的著作,以及一些历史学家关于少数族裔的研究。例如,第97页的奴隶船插图虽然广为人知,我也在其他地方见过,但它并非“唯一一幅写生作品”——不妨查阅当时的奴隶贸易手册,其中详细描绘了如何最有效、最彻底地奴役奴隶,包括手铐和鞭子的精细图解。这些资料通常会引发孩子们的思考——相比之下,这幅插图简直就像一艘游轮。此外,尽管书中象征性地提到了克里斯帕斯·阿图克斯(Crispus Attucks),但奴隶贸易以及非裔美国人对殖民地经济和文化的贡献却被一带而过,女性也只是被当作客串角色出现。

This is standard rah-rah stuff, with the bias one generally sees toward white, male, political history. It's upsetting to see so little mention of recent work, especially stuff like Nancy Cott37 on colonial women or various historian's work on minorities. The illustration [of a slave ship] on page 97, for example, is well-known and I've seen it elsewhere, but it's not true that it's the “only picture drawn from life”—check out slave trading manuals from the period, which show how bodies could be packed most efficiently and subdued—they have detailed drawings of manacles and whips. That generally sets the kids thinking—this illustration, by comparison, is like a cruise ship. Also, despite the token reference to Crispus Attucks, the slave trade and Afro-American contributions to the economy and culture of the colonies are glossed over, and women, too, are relegated to cameo appearances.

教师对教科书中关于庞蒂亚克叛乱的描述所作出的反应,更加凸显了这些差异。原文如下:

These differences were thrown into relief by the teacher's responses to the textbook's account of Pontiac's Rebellion. The passage read:

在渥太华族酋长庞蒂亚克的英明领导下,印第安人联合起来,阻止了白人对他们土地的进一步入侵。近一年来,印第安人和白人陷入了殊死搏斗。印第安人摧毁了尼亚加拉以西的大部分英国堡垒。死亡和破坏席卷了整个西部边境。最终,英国和殖民地军队重新夺回了这些堡垒。印第安人接受了宽容的和平条款。庞蒂亚克宣称:“我们将摒弃一切邪恶之事,并彼此努力,看谁能为维护我们之间如此牢固的友谊做出最大的贡献。” 38

Under the able leadership of Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, the Indians joined forces to prevent any further invasion of their lands. For nearly a year, the Indians and whites were locked in a desperate struggle. The Indians destroyed most of the British forts west of Niagara. Death and destruction raged along the length of the western frontier. Finally, British and colonial troops recaptured the forts. The Indians accepted generous peace terms. Pontiac declared, “We shall reject everything that tends to evil, and strive with each other to see who shall be of the most service in keeping up that friendship that is so happily established between us.”38

巴恩斯先生认为这种解释“清晰、准确且符合年级要求”。凯尔西女士再次表示反对:

Mr. Barnes characterized this explanation as “clear, accurate, and grade-appropriate.” Again, Ms. Kelsey disagreed:

糟糕。我很难相信事情会如此美好,而且不幸的是,我的学生们反应太慢,不会对这样的段落提出质疑。第2-4段含糊不清的措辞让人觉得,只有英国和殖民地军队才是秩序(以及美德)的化身。而庞蒂亚克的引言令人作呕,因为它脱离了他当时困境的恰当语境。像摩根的《美国奴隶制,美国自由》(1975)这样的著作清楚地表明了殖民者实际施加的残酷暴行。(顺便问一句,那些所谓的“慷慨的和平条款”究竟什么?此外,这些早期的土地冲突巧妙地预示了后来“昭昭天命”的推行——作者却忽略了这一概念。)

Uh-oh. I have a hard time believing things were this rosy and, unfortunately, my students will be all too slow to question a passage like this. The vague passages in paragraphs 2–4 make it sound like only the British and colonial troops were the repositories of order (and by implication virtue). And the Pontiac quote is nauseating, isolated as it is from the appropriate context of his plight. Works like Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom [1975] clearly indicate the cruelty which colonists in fact inflicted. (By the way, what were those “generous peace terms”? Also, these early land conflicts neatly presage later pushes for “manifest destiny”—a conceptual opportunity the author ignores.)

对学生理解的影响教师们对这本书对学生理解的影响也存在分歧。针对“这本书在纠正许多学生存在的历史误解方面的有效性”这一问题,巴恩斯先生认为这本书……这段文字在两处“尤其有效”:首先,在波士顿倾茶事件的图片说明中,图片显示袭击发生在白天,但文本提醒读者“实际上袭击者是在夜间偷偷登上船的”; 39 其次,在波士顿惨案的版画说明中,文本提醒读者“实际上在1770年3月的那天,只有10名士兵和大约60名抗议者发生了冲突”。 40 另一方面,凯尔西女士将“学生的误解”解释为她在练习1中提到的关于历史的根深蒂固的普遍观念。她认为这段文字“强化了误解,几乎没有消除误解”,因为“对女性、黑人和美洲原住民文化的糟糕描述会加深学生绝望的信念,即历史就是政治、战争和白人的功绩。”

Effects on student's understanding. The teachers also disagreed about the book's effects on student understanding. In response to a question about the text's effectiveness in “addressing the historical misconceptions that many students possess.” Mr. Barnes thought the book was “especially effective” in two places: first, in a caption to a picture of the Boston Tea Party, which has the raid taking place during daylight, the text warns readers that “actually the raiders sneaked on board the ship at night”;39 and second, in a caption for an engraving of the Boston Massacre, the text alerts readers that “actually there were only ten soldiers and about sixty protesters who clashed on that March day in 1770.”40 Ms. Kelsey, on the other hand, interpreted “student misconceptions” as the broad, entrenched beliefs about history she referred to in Exercise 1. She saw the text as “reinforcing misconceptions, hardly ameliorating them” because “the poor treatment accorded women, Blacks, and Native American cultures will tend to reinforce student's despairing conviction that history is all politics, wars, and the deeds of white men.”

补充材料的教学实用性这些不同的观点也体现在教师对教材补充材料的评价上。巴恩斯先生写道,这些材料包含“许多优秀的技能培养活动和理念”。他唯一的异议是,建议的作文题或许可以采用“客观题的形式”提出。

Pedagogical usefulness of supplementary materials. These divergent views carried over to the teacher's evaluations of the text's supplementary materials. Mr. Barnes wrote that these materials contained “many excellent skill building activities and ideas.” His sole objection was that a suggested essay question might have been better asked in an “objective format.”

凯尔西女士的态度则不那么积极。例如,两位老师都对一份关于地图绘制技能的练习题做出了回应。这份名为“完成地图:西部土地”的练习题要求学生“标注13个殖民地”,确定“ 1774年《魁北克法案》添加到魁北克的西部领土的南部边界”,并列出“1763年公告线以西未主张土地的五个殖民地”。巴恩斯先生将这份练习题列入他将使用的六项“优秀的技能培养活动”之一。凯尔西女士则不太热情。

Ms. Kelsey was less positive. For example, both teachers responded to a worksheet on mapping skills.41 Entitled “Completing a Map: Western Lands” this worksheet asked students to “label the 13 colonies” identify “the southern boundary of western territory added to Quebec by the Quebec Act of 1774” and name “the five colonies [that] did not claim land west of the Proclamation Line of 1763” Mr. Barnes listed the worksheet among the six “excellent skill building activities” he would use. Ms. Kelsey was less enthusiastic:

这张地图练习册完全剥夺了孩子们发挥创造力的机会,无论是色彩运用、符号设计还是解读。地图过于简略,除了政治信息外,几乎一无所获,因此遗漏了南方主要水道、阿巴拉契亚山脉的重要性、阿迪朗达克山脉和绿山的位置等关键信息。它甚至没有标出波士顿和查尔斯顿。因此,这张地图严重阻碍了学生对殖民地时期多样性和统一性的初步认知。

The map worksheet gives kids no chance to get creative, whether with color, symbols, or interpretation. The map is also too sketchy to give anything but political information and thus leaves out critical information like the South's main waterways, the importance of the Appalachians, the position of the Adirondacks and Green Mountains. It fails to show either Boston or Charleston. And it thus severely hampers student's embryonic perceptions of both diversity and unity in the colonies.

盘点库存

TAKING STOCK

教材分析练习澄清了我们之前的一些猜测,也加深了另一些猜测。例如,“我不知道最近有什么学术研究”这样的评论。“被忽视的”这一观点表明,巴恩斯先生自六十年代以来并未关注美国历史的发展。他似乎对“教科书历史”(即学校教科书中的事实和时间顺序内容)有着广泛的了解,但对历史学家用来赋予历史意义的解释框架却知之甚少。由此可见,两位教师在学科知识方面存在实质性差异,这进一步印证了假设D(历史知识)。

The Textbook Analysis exercise clarified some of our earlier hunches and deepened others. Comments such as “I know of no recent scholarship which is neglected” show that Mr. Barnes has not followed developments in American history since the sixties. He seems to have extensive knowledge of “textbook history” the factual and chronological content found in school textbooks, but seems less knowledgeable about the interpretive frameworks historians use to bring meaning to the past. It appears, then, that there are substantive differences in the subject matter knowledge of the two teachers, an extension of Hypothesis D (historical knowledge).

或许教师们最激烈的分歧在于该书对女性和少数族裔的处理方式。我们推测,这种分歧源于两位教师评判该书优劣的标准截然不同。巴恩斯先生将这本书与其他教科书进行比较,尤其是他自己使用的两本。凯尔西女士则以不同的标准来评判该书——她将南希·科特关于女性史的著作或埃德蒙·摩根关于奴隶制的著作作为参照。按照这个标准,书中侧边栏和章节末尾对女性和少数族裔的处理方式显得十分粗糙。在练习1之后,我们推测巴恩斯和凯尔西对自身角色和责任的理解存在差异(假设A)。在这里,我们找到了进一步的证据来支持这一论断,尤其关注教师对自身在课程材料方面角色的认知。巴恩斯先生而言,教师的决策呈现出一种非此即彼的二元性。当他评价这本书的某些方面时,要么称赞其优秀,要么像对待作文题那样,认为应该替换掉。在他看来,教师们要么接受要么拒绝课程材料,却很少对其进行调整和修改。这种观点可以解释巴恩斯在前一次练习中的回答,当时他坚持认为原始文献可以用于AP课程,但不适合普通学生。

Perhaps the teacher's sharpest disagreement concerned the book's treatment of women and minorities. We speculate that this disagreement stemmed from the qualitatively different touchstones each teacher used to judge the book's soundness. Mr. Barnes compared the book with other textbooks, especially the two he uses. Ms. Kelsey held the text to a different standard—works by Nancy Cott in women's history or Edmund Morgan on slavery. Using this standard, the treatment of women and minorities in sidebars and end-of-the-chapter sections seemed shabby indeed. After Exercise 1, we speculated that Barnes and Kelsey hold different conceptions of their roles and responsibilities (Hypothesis A). Here we find further evidence for that assertion but with particular reference to the teacher's perception of their role vis-a-vis curricular materials. For Mr. Barnes, teacher decision making took on a binary quality. When he evaluated some aspect of the book, he either said it was excellent or, as in the case of the essay question, that it should be replaced. In his view, teachers accept or reject curricular materials but do little to adapt and modify them. This view sheds light on Barnes' responses in the previous exercise, when he was adamant that primary documents could be used with AP but not with average students.

凯尔西女士认为课程材料需要进行调整和改造。我们在之前的练习中已经看到这一点,当时她描述了自己修改这套文件的计划。在这次练习中,她阐述了如何调整建议的活动和现成的练习题。例如,她认为练习题22很有价值,这是一份关于福吉谷情况的目击者记录,其中“开始触及一些严肃的问题,比如‘你认为这是一个可靠的信息来源吗?’ ”但她也意识到,如此重要的问题需要进行调整才能交给学生。

Ms. Kelsey sees curricular materials as something to adapt and transform. We saw this in the previous exercise when she described her plans to modify the set of documents. In this exercise, she described how she would mold suggested activities and ready-made worksheets. For example, she saw value in Worksheet 22, an eyewitness account of the conditions at Valley Forge that “starts to get at some serious issues like ‘Do you think it is a reliable source?’ ” But she recognized that a question of this magnitude needed to be adapted before it could be given to students.

或许,教师对“采用本书的利弊”的总结性评论最能体现这些不同的方法。对巴恩斯先生来说,采用本书的主要好处在于“将一本编写精良、内容新颖、适合相应年级的教科书引入课堂”。“把教材和配套的精美材料送到每位老师手中。”主要的缺点在于费用:花这么多钱买书,“学生们可能仍然会拒绝阅读……因为归根结底,它只是一本教科书。”巴恩斯先生倾向于用非黑即白的眼光看待教育决策:应该采用这本书,但学生们不会读它。

Perhaps these different approaches are best exemplified in the teacher's summary comments about the “benefits and drawbacks of adopting this book.” For Mr. Barnes, the chief benefit of adoption would be to “put a well-written, up-to-date, grade-level-appropriate textbook into the hands of students and a fine set of accompanying materials into the hands of each teacher.” The chief drawback would be the expense: spending so much money on books that “students might still refuse to read…because it is, after all, only a textbook.” Mr. Barnes tended to cast educational decisions in black and white: The book should be adopted but students wouldn't read it.

人们或许会认为凯尔西女士不会从采用这本书中获益良多。然而事实恰恰相反,她找到了将书中的不足转化为教学契机的方法:“(这本书)可以被富有创造力的老师以多种方式改编。它的阅读难度适中,信息上的疏漏可以成为宝贵的批判性思维练习,尤其是在补充材料的帮助下。”看来,不同的前提促使每位老师对课程持有不同的态度。巴恩斯先生而言,课程材料提供的是固定的选项。而凯尔西女士而言,它们则蕴含着可以根据特定情境和目标进行调整的潜力。

One might imagine that Ms. Kelsey would find few benefits in adoption. On the contrary, she found a way to turn the book's shortcomings into pedagogical opportunities: “[The text could] be adapted in many different ways by a creative teacher. The reading level is reasonable, and glitches in information could be valuable critical thinking exercises, especially with supplementary materials.” Different premises, it seems, motivate each teacher's stance toward curriculum. For Mr. Barnes, curricular materials present fixed options. For Ms. Kelsey, they present potentialities to be shaped to fit particular contexts and goals.

教师的书面评语中还透露出其他一些差异。凯尔西女士对历史与学生学习动机之间关系的敏锐洞察力和关注度在这项练习中再次得到体现,这印证了假设E(教学内容知识)。在评估教师手册中关于学生研究玛丽·沃伦、约翰·汉考克、约瑟夫·沃伦、塞缪尔·亚当斯以及其他美国独立战争人物的建议时,她评论道:“我的学生对研究塞缪尔·亚当斯的兴趣,就跟我对听扭曲姐妹乐队(一支20世纪80年代的摇滚乐队)的兴趣一样。这项活动急需一些亮点。”同样,在练习2中,她多次提到阅读原始资料的情感体验,指出阅读历史人物的文字对青少年来说是多么激动人心,这是“引导孩子们开始进行历史思考的绝佳方式”。 42

Still other differences echo between the lines in the teacher's written comments. Ms. Kelsey's sensitivity and attention to the relationship between history and student motivation surfaced again in this exercise, supporting Hypothesis E (pedagogical content knowledge). In evaluating a suggestion in the teacher's manual that students conduct research projects on Mary Warren, John Hancock, Joseph Warren, Samuel Adams, and other figures from the Revolution, she commented, “My kids are about as interested in researching Sam Adams as I am in hearing Twisted Sister [a 1980s rock group]. The activity badly needs some spark.” Similarly, in Exercise 2, she referred several times to the affective experience of reading original sources, how reading the words of the people who made history can be exciting for adolescents, a “fabulous way to get the kids to start to think historically.”42

这些评论表明了一种思考历史的方式,这种方式始终关注青少年的兴趣和倾向。它们表明,凯尔西女士认为,精心挑选、用心呈现的历史资料能够激发学生的兴趣和学习动力。相比之下,我们在巴恩斯先生的回答中很少发现与学生学习动力相关的内容。相反,我们发现巴恩斯先生认为学生缺乏学习动力,并且在历史课程中找不到任何能激发他们兴趣的东西。在审阅练习1中“A-”的作文时,他假定学生写的是“一个他可能并不感兴趣的话题”。在同一练习中,他还评论说,“现在的学生读书”只是为了取得好成绩,或者“为了周末买车,或者……”甚至是为了进入他们理想的大学。”在练习2中,他认为即使是他的AP学生也会对文献练习感到畏惧:“他们宁愿被告知发生了什么,然后记住它以备考试。”在这里,他假定学生不会阅读教科书,无论教科书多么有趣或写得多么好。我们找不到任何他谈到能激发学生兴趣、挑战学生或令学生不安的历史内容的例子,这与凯尔西女士回忆起向学生展示手铐和鞭子的图片并评论说“这通常会引发孩子们的思考”的情况截然不同。

These comments suggest a way of thinking about history that never loses sight of the interests and dispositions of adolescents. They suggest that Ms. Kelsey believes that historical materials, carefully selected and thoughtfully presented, can excite and motivate students. In contrast, we found little in Mr. Barnes' responses that spoke to student motivation. If anything, we found evidence that Barnes thinks students are unmotivated and find little in the history curriculum that excites them. When reviewing the “A-” essay in Exercise 1, he assumed that the student was writing “about a topic he might not have any personal interest in.” In the same exercise, he remarked that “today's students don't read” except to get a good grade or to “get the car for the weekend or maybe even to get into the college of their choice.” In Exercise 2, he believed that even his AP students would balk at a document exercise: “They would rather just be told what happened and then remember it for the test.” Here he assumed that students would not read textbooks, no matter how interesting or well-written. We could find no instance in which he spoke about historical content that excites, challenges, or unsettles students, nothing analogous to Ms. Kelsey's memory of presenting students with pictures of manacles and whips, about which she remarked: “That generally sets the kids thinking.”

判断的背景:时间和空间的痕迹

THE CONTEXTS OF JUDGMENT: WRINKLES IN TIME AND PLACE

我们重视专业判断,但这项分析也提醒我们其复杂性。一方面,我们有信心指出巴恩斯和凯尔西的表现确实存在差异,而且这些差异在很多方面都意义重大。此外,我们在完成本文之前审阅的另外六项练习的数据也支持了我们在此提出的假设,但同时也提出了一些补充说明和扩展。 43然而,从观察差异到基于这些差异做出决策,下一步就引发了关于教师将如何被评判——以及由谁来评判——的问题。接下来,我们将探讨其中的一些问题,首先从我们作为“评判者”自身遇到的担忧开始。

We value professional judgment, yet this analysis reminds us of its complexity. On one level, we feel confident in saying there were real differences in the performances of Barnes and Kelsey, and that these differences are significant in a number of ways. Moreover, data from six additional exercises, which we reviewed prior to completing this article, provide support for the hypotheses we lay out here, but not without added qualifications and expansions.43 Yet taking the next step, moving from observations of differences to making decisions on their basis, raises questions about how teachers will be judged—and by whom. We now turn to some of these issues, beginning with concerns we encountered as “judges” ourselves.

如果我们声称自己没有更倾向于凯尔西的回答而非巴恩斯的,那将是不诚实的。我们也不会暗示我们对其中一位教师的肯定仅仅是巧合或历史的偶然事件。事实上,我们发现的这两位教师之间的差异,代表着我们作为个体以及作为学术共同体成员,在理解教学、学习和历史学科方面发生的重大转变。凯尔西女士在1984年,在一所著名的研究型大学学习成为一名教师,而当时认知革命的影响正以前所未有的速度显现。在她的课程学习中,她接触到了维果茨基的中介学习理论,并学习了各种应用这些理论的策略——合作小组作业、跨能力辅导、双人学习。一门关于读写能力的课程让她接触到了琳达·弗劳尔和约翰·海耶的写作模型,该模型非常强调撰写多份草稿的重要性。 44而她所处的教育环境也包含着对……的承诺。所有学生都能学习高阶内容,同时,教学中应注重搭建学习支架,以促进这一目标的实现。45

It would be dishonest for us to claim that we did not find ourselves favoring Kelsey's responses over Barnes'. Nor would we suggest that our affirmation of one teacher over the other was a coincidence or historical accident. Indeed, the differences we found between these two teachers represent major shifts in how we, as individuals and as members of academic communities, conceptualize teaching, learning, and the discipline of history. Ms. Kelsey studied to be a teacher at a time, 1984, and a place, a prestigious research university, where the effects of the cognitive revolution were being felt as never before. In her course work she encountered Vygotskian notions of mediated learning and studied various strategies—cooperative group work, cross-ability tutoring, dyadic learning—for applying them. A class on literacy introduced her to Linda Flower and John Haye's model of composition, with its strong emphasis on preparing multiple drafts of written work.44 And the social milieu of her education program included a commitment to the learning of sophisticated content by all students, as well as an emphasis on the scaffolding of instruction that might allow this to come about.45

同样,她对历史的理解也反映了该学科的最新发展。过去几十年间,历史学发生了翻天覆地的变化传统的政治史和经济史被一些前所未闻的历史形式所取代(有些人甚至认为它们已被取代)。对这些发展的回顾指出:

Similarly, her understanding of history reflected recent developments in that discipline. History has undergone dramatic changes in the past few decades46 as traditional political and economic history have been joined (some would say supplanted) by forms of history unheard of in previous eras. A review of these developments noted:

新社会史、新工人阶级史、新教育史,以及黑人史、原住民史、女性主义史和族裔史,仅仅涵盖了20世纪60年代末和70年代涌现的众多挑战传统历史综合方法的课题领域和方法论中的一小部分。47

The new social history, the new working class history, the new educational history, as well as black history, native history, feminist history, and ethnic history encompass only a few of the topic areas and methodologies which emerged to challenge the traditional historical synthesis in the late 1960s and 1970s.47

单一的叙事模式——歌颂那些伟大(且大多为白人)男性的成就——被各种相互竞争的声音所取代。不仅以前无权无势的人获得了权利,而且以前有权有势的人也发生了转变。48

The single narrative heralding the accomplishments of great, mostly white, men gave way to a panoply of competing voices. Not only have the previously powerless been enfranchised, but the previously enfranchised have been transformed.48

这些变化不仅仅是一系列新的研究主题,它们触及了历史学的认识论核心。到了20世纪80年代初,历史学家发现官方历史叙事的观念逐渐消退,因为历史学以及几乎所有其他学科都受到了语言学转向的冲击。历史叙事不再仅仅是书写出来的——它们是被建构的;49那种与作者立场隔绝、客观的历史观(这种观点在20世纪60年代中期还占据主导地位)50让位于一种带有甚至颂扬其创作者印记的历史观。51简而言之,像巴恩斯先生这样接受过当时训练的人,能够拥有凯尔西女士所展现的那种知识和知识,实属罕见。同样,凯尔西女士在20世纪80年代中期毕业于一所著名历史系,获得学士学位。如果她具备这些理解,就会被认为完全误解了重点。52

More than simply being a new set of topics, these changes cut to the epistemological core of the discipline. The notion of historians discovering the official story of the past faded by the early 1980s as history, along with practically every other discipline, reeled from the impact of the linguistic turn. No longer were historical narratives simply writ-ten—they were constructed;49 and a disinterested history isolated from the commitments of its authors, a view that held sway as recently as the mid-1960s,50 yielded to a history that bore, even celebrated, the imprint of those who composed it.51 In short, it would have been remarkable for someone like Mr. Barnes, trained when he was, to emerge with the kinds of knowledge and the view of that knowledge that Ms. Kelsey displayed. Likewise, as someone who received her B.A. from a prestigious history department in the mid-1980s, had Ms. Kelsey not possessed these understandings she would have been seen as having missed the whole point.52

作为根植于教育学、心理学和历史学领域的研究者,我们都学会了以类似于前文所述的方式来构建我们的思维框架。此外,我们并非唯一持有这些观点的人,而是作为构建和共享这些理念的话语社群的成员而拥护它们。在某个重要方面,我们欣赏凯尔西女士的表现,因为她对学习和教学的看法与我们非常契合。的确,我们觉得再也找不到比这更合适的选择了。

As researchers with roots in the educational, psychological, and historical communities, both of us learned to frame our thinking in ways similar to those we lay out in the preceding paragraphs. Moreover, we are not unique in holding these perspectives, but espouse them as members of discourse communities that construct and share these commitments. In one important respect, we found favor with Ms. Kelsey's performances because her views on learning and teaching were in close alignment with our own. Indeed, we could not have imagined a better match.

我们尝试将自身、我们的教学练习以及这两位教师的反馈置于特定的历史背景中,这为这些数据提供了新的视角。教学不能脱离其所处的时代和地点而评判。如果这些练习是在1957年而非20世纪80年代末进行实地测试,巴恩斯先生的许多观察结果就不会受到质疑。例如,很少有人会质疑他认为历史教学就是传授一系列经济和政治史事实的观点;也很少有人会对他将波士顿倾茶事件发生在白天这一学生误解的例子感到惊讶。许多人会同意,原始文献更适合AP课程的学生,而不是普通课程或补习课程的学生。53同样,认为一组作文反映的是学生能力的正态分布——而非他们之前的学习、学习动机或考试实施条件——的观点,以及“熟能生巧”的作文写作理念,都会得到广泛认同。最后,巴恩斯所依赖的所谓“传统教学方法”在20世纪60年代和70年代的教育研究文献中得到了大量支持。这些文献致力于探索最有效的口头信息传递方式,以便学生能够在成绩测试中记住这些信息。54

This brief effort to place ourselves, our performance exercises, and the responses of these two teachers in context casts a different light on these data. Teaching cannot be judged apart from the time and place in which it is situated. Had these exercises been field-tested in 1957, not the late 1980s, many of Mr. Barnes' observations would not have been questioned. Few people, for example, would have challenged his belief that teaching history consisted of imparting a set of facts about economic and political history; few would have been surprised at his citing as an example of a student misconception the false belief that the Boston Tea Party took place during daylight. Many would have agreed that primary documents are more appropriate for AP students than those in the “regular” or “remedial” tracks.53 Likewise, the belief that a set of essays reflected the normal distribution of student's abilities—not their prior instruction, their motivation to succeed, or the conditions of the test's administration—would have found a receptive audience, as would the notion that practice makes perfect in essay writing. Finally, Barnes' reliance on what he called the “old didactic approach” found much support in the education research literature of the 1960s and 1970s, a literature dedicated to establishing the most effective ways to deliver verbal information so that students could remember it on achievement tests.54

诚然,我们可以将巴恩斯先生的观点置于一个更合适的语境中,使其问题比上世纪80年代末设计的评估方法要少得多。此外,我们无需乘坐时光机就能在今天找到这样的语境。尽管学者和改革者可能呼吁废除分班制度 55并采用非传统的课堂教学模式 56,但大多数学校仍然实行分班制,大多数教学仍然以说教为主。尽管改革者和学者可能会提出不同的教育模式 57 ,但教学看起来与本世纪大部分时间以来的模式惊人地相似 58 。

To be sure, we can place Mr. Barnes' ideas into a context that renders them less problematic than an assessment designed in the late 1980s. Moreover, we need not enter a time machine to find such contexts today. Although scholars and reformers might call for the abolition of tracking55 and alternatives to frontal instruction,56 most schools remain tracked, and most teaching remains didactic. Much as reformers and academics might argue for alternative images of schooling,57 teaching looks eerily the same as it has looked for most of this century.58

即使我们实施变革,教师群体中信仰、知识、经验和性情的多样性依然存在,而且也应该存在。旧的理念仍将与新的理念并存,自由派和保守派也依然存在。这种混合使得判断问题永远难以解决,且极其复杂。在最后一部分,我们再次提出一系列可能性,并请读者逐一考虑。

Even if we were to implement change, diversity of belief, knowledge, experience, and disposition among teachers would, and should, remain. The old would still dwell alongside the new, the liberal alongside the conservative. This mixture leaves the question of judgment forever difficult and uncompromisingly complex. In the final section, we again offer a set of possibilities and ask the reader to consider each in turn.

替代评估,替代行动

ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENTS, ALTERNATIVE ACTIONS

根据我们对凯尔西和巴恩斯的描述,可以得出几种可能的行动方案。我们的目标是描述其中一些方案并探讨它们。其含义在于提出而非解答关于解读和行动的难题。通过概述运用这些数据的不同方式,我们希望强调使用此类评估来设定教师卓越标准的复杂性。

Several possible courses of action arise from our descriptions of Kelsey and Barnes. Our goal is to describe some options and explore their implications, to pose but not answer dilemmas of interpretation and action. By sketching out different ways these data can be acted on, we hope to highlight the slippery nature of using such assessments to set standards of teacher excellence.

为了简化起见,我们采用了几种修辞手法。首先,我们假设我们只会根据此处呈现的数据采取行动,而不会考虑测试组合中的另外六项练习、现场直接观察以及在实际评估中会收集的其他信息来源。其次,我们将行动方案尽可能简化——仅以通过或不通过的二元决定——尽管任何绩效体系都必然会以低、中、高三个等级来呈现结果。第三,我们在讨论中扮演“魔鬼代言人”的角色,用极其生硬的措辞来描述各种可能性,希望这种生硬的措辞能更好地揭示每种可能性的潜在影响。

For simplicity's sake, we resort to several rhetorical fictions. First, we pretend that we would act only on the data presented here, not the additional six exercises in the battery, the direct observations in the field, and other sources of information that would be assembled in a real assessment. Second, we cast the courses of action as simply as possible—a binary decision of pass or fail—though any performance system will surely present its results on a continuum of low to medium to high. Third, we play devil's advocate in this discussion, stating possibilities in terms uncomfortably stark, hoping that such starkness better reveals the implications of each possibility.

可能性一:巴恩斯先生通过评估,凯尔西女士未通过凯尔西女士的回答中洋溢着青春的理想主义,很容易让人产生共鸣。虽然许多人可能会赞赏她致力于帮助所有学生学习她认为重要的知识,但也有人会对此有所保留。例如,她强调“历史作为一种视角”,却忽略了将我们联系在一起的知识——许多评论家认为,这种共同的历史知识对于成为知情的公民至关重要。巴恩斯先生对“342箱”茶叶的关注,虽然脱离语境很容易被嘲讽,但它代表了一种根深蒂固的传统学习观。当三分之二的十七岁青少年无法将南北战争的确切日期精确到五十年前,当近三分之一的人不知道美国在二战中与哪些国家交战时,我们又如何能证明像凯尔西那样,花费一周时间教授“记录和观察技能”是合理的呢?历史一种诠释,但诠释必须建立在扎实的事实知识之上。凯尔西对事实的轻视或许表明,她需要与经验丰富的教师合作,以形成对历史知识本质更为平衡的认识。

Possibility 1: Mr. Barnes passes the assessment, Ms. Kelsey fails. It is easy to get swept up in the youthful idealism that permeates Ms. Kelsey's responses. While many might applaud her commitment to helping all students learn things she deems important, others would have reservations. For example, her focus on “history as perspective” deemphasizes the knowledge that binds us together, the shared knowledge of history that many commentators believe is necessary for informed citizenship. Mr. Barnes' focus on “342 chests” of tea, although easy to parody when ripped from context, represents a view of learning that has the weight of tradition behind it. When two-thirds of seventeen-year-olds cannot date the Civil War within fifty years, when nearly a third do not know what countries the United States fought in World War II,59 how can we justify devoting a week of instruction, as Kelsey would do, to “recording and observation skills”? History is interpretation, but interpretation must be backed by solid knowledge of facts. Kelsey's deemphasis of facts might suggest that she needs to work with experienced teachers to develop a more balanced perspective on the nature of historical knowledge.

巴恩斯缺乏女权主义史或少数族裔史方面的专业知识并非缺点。历史课堂需要的是通才,而不是只能阐明历史某个角落的人。新型历史研究的爆炸式增长已经危及我们提供美国历史“全貌”的能力。“人人都是自己的专家”这种风气导致了知识的碎片化,催生了一大批只会造砖却找不到实干家的人。60社会研究领域早在20世纪60年代就出现了这种碎片化现象,当时充斥着大量的“迷你课程”。课程设置方面,凯尔西女士倾向于对女性史或社会史等议题进行深入探讨,这可能会导致学生产生类似的困惑。

Nor is Barnes' lack of expertise in feminist or minority history a fault. The history classroom needs generalists, not people who can illuminate a single corner of our past. The explosion of new types of historical research has imperiled our ability to provide a “big picture” of the American past. A spirit of “every man his own specialist” has led to the fragmentation of knowledge and spawned legions of brick-makers with no builders in sight.60 The social studies had already witnessed this kind of fragmentation in the 1960s, when a welter of “mini-courses” littered the curriculum. Ms. Kelsey's tendency to give in-depth treatment to issues such as women's history or social history might result in similar confusion in student's minds.

从凯尔西女士的言辞中可以明显看出,她更注重深度而非广度。然而,美国历史教师肩负着涵盖整个历史的重任,如果将她一个单元的教学计划扩展到一整年,显然是不切实际的。61任何主题都不可能达到同等的深度,而凯尔西的回答并没有让我们深入了解她是否意识到这一点,或者——更重要的是——她是否具备应对这一挑战的能力。她所倡导的这种教学模式在学校中几乎没有任何持久性。如果说有什么预示的话,那就是她的理想主义预示着她很快就会离开这个行业。另一方面,巴恩斯的方法体现了专家的快速处理能力,他能够瞬间应对海量信息。他的方法和观点体现了久经考验的教学法,一种经受住了时间考验的教学方法。在这个改革的时代,我们却急于摒弃这些传统,对它们能为学生提供的学习体验嗤之以鼻。正如《社会研究评论》的一篇社论所感叹的那样,“诸如机械操练和背诵之类的严格教学方法已经声名狼藉。具有前瞻性的课程试图将学生从旧观念中解放出来,就像将他们从狄更斯笔下的监狱中解放出来一样。” 62

It is clear from Ms. Kelsey's words that she prefers depth over coverage. Yet U.S. history teachers are charged with covering our entire past, and her plans for one unit are unrealistic if extended across an entire year.61 One cannot cover all topics in equal depth, and Kelsey's responses provide us with little insight into whether she acknowledges this or—more important—possesses the skills to deal with it. The brand of teaching she espouses has shown remarkably little staying power in schools. If predictive of anything, her idealism forecasts early flight from the profession. Barnes' approach, on the other hand, represents the quick processing of an expert, someone who has learned to cope with huge amounts of information in an instant. His method and outlook exemplify tried and true pedagogy, an approach to teaching that has withstood the test of time. We are quick in this age of reform to dismiss these traditions, sneering at the kind of experiences they provide for students. As an editorial in the Social Studies Review lamented, “Rigorous techniques such as drill and recitation have fallen into ignominy. Forward-thinking courses seek to liberate students from old attitudes, as though from Dickensian prisons.”62

凯尔西女士的言论听起来很合时宜,尤其对于那些习惯于当前改革论调的人来说。而巴恩斯则奉行一套经受住了改革浪潮考验的扎实教学法。因此,问题随之而来:我们对卓越教学的标准是否应该着眼长远,借鉴那些久经考验的优秀教学理念?或者,我们是否应该毫不掩饰地关注当下,寄希望于我们今天所提供的不仅是新的,而且是更好的?又或者,我们是否应该尝试两者兼顾,将传统与创新相结合,相信这种兼收并蓄的方式不会带来混乱,反而会带来优势?

Ms. Kelsey says things that sound good to ears trained on the rhetoric of current reforms. Barnes, on the other hand, practices a solid pedagogy that has weathered torrents of reform. And so these questions arise: Should our standard of teaching excellence consider the long view, taking into account venerable ways of conceptualizing good teaching? Or should our approach be unabashedly presentist, borne by the hope that what we offer today is not merely new but better? Or should we make some attempt to do both, grafting old onto new in the belief that eclecticism will lead not to confusion, but to strength?

可能性二:巴恩斯先生评估不及格,凯尔西女士评估及格直白地说,有人可能会认为,教师负有道德责任,确保所有学生都能获得重要知识,并有机会以拓展思维的方式运用这些知识。根据这种观点,巴恩斯先生断然拒绝让除顶尖学生以外的任何人使用原始文献,犯了一个致命的错误。他认为,不同能力的学生应该接受不同的课程,并设定不同的目标。然而,只有精英学生才能接触原始文献的观点却站不住脚。当今的改革努力正对“学生应该获得专业知识或有机会接触启发性课程”这一观点提出质疑。63巴恩斯先生并非不认同“所有学生都能学习”的观点。他相信他们能够学习。但他不认同“所有学生都能学习复杂的学科知识并以深刻的方式思考”的说法。他的言论表明,他并不质疑学生带入课堂的固有标签。此外,几乎没有证据表明他的教学实践会促使他重新审视这些标签。

Possibility 2: Mr. Barnes fails the assessment, Ms. Kelsey passes. Stated in the starkest of terms, one might argue that teaching carries an ethical responsibility to insure that all students have access to important knowledge and the opportunity to use it in ways that stretch their minds. According to this argument, Mr. Barnes made a fatal error when he flatly rejected the use of primary documents for anyone but his top students. He believes that students of different abilities should be provided with different curricula and different goals. Yet the notion that only elite students should be provided access to specialized knowledge or given the opportunity to interact with stimulating curricula is being challenged by today's reform efforts.63 It is not that Mr. Barnes would disagree with the idea that “all students can learn.” He believes they can. But he would disagree with the claim that all students can learn complex subject matter and think about it in sophisticated ways. His words suggest that he does not question the labels students bring with them to class. Moreover, there is little evidence that his pedagogical practices would lead him to reconsider these labels.

通过拒绝向巴恩斯先生颁发教师资格证,可能性2表明了其对教师在教学和学习方面应具备的知识、思想和信念的立场。然而,尽管存在这种立场——以及它所代表的改革者、政策制定者和学者的言论——巴恩斯先生仍然会在许多学校担任重要的教职员工。我们甚至可以说,“所有学生都能学习高深内容”这一理念是一种规范性的理想,尚未得到实证研究的支持。我们尚未发现任何研究表明补习生能够成功解读晦涩难懂的历史文献,也未发现任何研究系统地记录了教师在帮助所有学生学习识别、探索和解决历史问题方面取得的成功。我们相信——事实上,我们希望——未来会出现这样的研究。但与此同时,我们能否因为巴恩斯先生没有接受一个尚未被实证证实的美好愿望而惩罚他呢?

By denying certification to Mr. Barnes, Possibility 2 takes a stand on what teachers ought to know, think, and believe about teaching and learning. But despite this stand—and the statements of reformers, policymakers, and scholars that it represents—there are many schools in which Mr. Barnes would be a valued staff member. We would go so far as to say that the notion that “all students can learn sophisticated content” is a normative ideal not yet supported by empirical evidence. We know of no studies that demonstrate that remedial students can successfully interpret difficult historical sources, no studies that systematically document teacher's success helping all students learn to identify, explore, and solve historical problems. We believe—indeed, we hope—that such studies will be forthcoming. But in the meantime, can we penalize Barnes for not embracing a hope that has yet to be realized empirically?

那么,教师执教的历史、思想和社会背景在多大程度上应该纳入评估结果?巴恩斯和凯尔西应该用同样的标准来评判吗?或者,这些标准是否应该考虑到每位教师的学术和个人经历,甚至是他们所在学校的规范?

To what extent, then, should the historical, intellectual, and social contexts in which teachers practice be factored into the outcome of an assessment? Should Barnes and Kelsey be judged by the same standards? Or should these standards take into account each teacher's intellectual and personal history or even the norms of the schools in which they work?

可能性三:两位教师均通过如果一群经验丰富的历史教师对巴恩斯先生的表现进行评估,他们很可能会一致认为他是一位称职的专业人士,理应通过评估。他们会注意到,他能够为自己的答案提供合理的解释,能够以符合他们自身理解的方式讨论教学,并且展现出对教科书中历史内容的深刻理解。他们还会注意到,他是一位思维缜密、深思熟虑的思考者。两位教师在几个方面存在差异——例如他们对历史的理解、他们对历史的实质性知识以及他们对历史/社会研究教育目标的信念——但这不应该影响他们的评估结果。这些差异不应受到质疑。相反,根据这种观点,这些差异应被视为教学工作中固有的组成部分,甚至应该受到赞扬。毕竟,历史学家对历史研究的本质并无共识,政策制定者和家长对教育目标或课程设置也存在分歧。心理学家和人类学家对学习的本质也尚未达成一致。对于诸如“学生应该了解哪些历史知识?”、“教师应该如何教学?”、“学生之间的哪些差异至关重要?”等问题,没有人能给出确切的答案。巴恩斯先生凯尔西女士会给出不同的答案——我们的数据也证实了这一点。在一个民主社会中,我们希望能够建立起一个培育和支持思想与观点多样性的社群。

Possibility 3: Both teachers pass. If a group of experienced history teachers reviewed Mr. Barnes' performance, they would likely agree that he is a competent professional who deserves to pass the assessment. They would note that he could justify his answers, discuss teaching in a way consistent with their own understanding, and demonstrate deep knowledge of the history contained in textbooks. They would note that he is a thoughtful and deliberate thinker. The fact that the two teachers differ in several areas—their conceptions of history, their substantive knowledge of history, their beliefs about the goals of history/social studies education—should not be held up for question. Rather, according to this view, these differences should be accepted as inherent in the work of teaching, perhaps even celebrated. After all, historians do not agree about the nature of historical scholarship, nor do policymakers and parents agree on educational goals or curriculum. And psychologists and anthropologists have not reached agreement on the nature of learning. No one holds the definite answer to such questions as: What should students know about history? How should teachers teach? What differences among students matter? Mr. Barnes and Ms. Kelsey would answer these questions differently—our data bear witness to that. And in a democracy, we would hope to create communities that nurtured and supported diversity of thought and opinion.

然而,这里存在一些令人不安的问题。我们所推崇的多元化根植于知识。例如,我们珍视不同的历史观点,因为当它们相互交融,丰富我们对历史的整体理解时,我们便会重视这些观点。但学校中所谓的“知识多元化”往往源于其他方面。学校之所以存在多元化,是因为封闭的教学模式助长了孤立主义和个人主义。教师们在物理上和思想上彼此隔绝,彼此疏远,往往对教授相同主题、面向类似学生的同事的教学方法知之甚少。他们交流教学经验的机会寥寥无几,观摩其他成年人教学的机会更是少之又少。因此,学生们接触到的是一种杂乱无章的多元化,一种不同观点的拼凑,而作为初学者的他们却被要求将其融会贯通。建立在公认的知识、背景和观点差异之上的多元化固然值得称道;但源于孤立和无知的多元化对任何人都没有好处,尤其对学生而言更是如此。

Yet there is something unsettling here. The diversity we seek to celebrate is rooted in knowledge. For example, we value diverse historical views when they engage each other in ways that enrich the totality of our understanding. But the intellectual diversity in schools often has roots elsewhere. Schools are diverse because the closed-door norms of teaching support isolationism and privatism. Physically and intellectually separated from each other, teachers grow apart and often have little idea how a colleague teaching the same topic to similar students might go about it. The opportunities to talk about teaching are few; the opportunities to watch other adults doing it, even fewer. Consequently, students experience a haphazard diversity, a hodgepodge of different views that they, as novices, are expected to synthesize. A diversity built on acknowledged differences of knowledge, background, and opinion is laudable; but one that results from isolation and ignorance benefits no one, least of all students.

此外,我们不禁要问,某些形式的多元化是否价值有限?例如,我们应该推崇“无所不包”的多元化吗?还是应该让多元化遵循基于知识和原则的标准?

Moreover, we wonder whether some forms of diversity are of limited value. For example, should we celebrate a diversity of “anything goes”? Or should diversity be held accountable to standards grounded in knowledge and principles?

可能性四:两位教师均获得临时合格资格,并有机会提升技能和知识或许可以通过为两位教师提供持续的专业发展培训来解决上文提到的背景问题。巴恩斯先生在学校工作近30年,几乎没有机会体验到学校之外发生的思想变革。然而,这些变革对人们思考教学的方式有着深远的影响。这些变革从根本上改变了我们对知识、公平、民主、历史和教育的看法——历史学家们也对此进行了深入探讨心理学家、哲学家和政治活动家们都深知,这些理念如今正逐渐以学校改革的形式渗透到社会各个层面。如果巴恩斯先生是推动这些转变的讨论社群的一员,或者如果他能更容易地接触到这些社群,他或许也会对教学、学生和历史产生不同的思考。他不会局限于他获得硕士学位时所处的那个年代的思想潮流,而是会随着知识的增长而成长,随着视角的变化而改变。

Possibility 4: Both teachers pass provisionally and are provided opportunities to improve their skills and knowledge. Perhaps the problems of context raised above could be addressed by ongoing professional development for both teachers. Mr. Barnes has been in schools for close to 30 years and has had little opportunity to experience the intellectual shifts that have occurred outside them. Yet these shifts have implications for how one thinks about teaching. Fundamental shifts in how we view knowledge, equity, democracy, history, and education—shifts that historians and psychologists, philosophers and political activists are well aware of—are just now trickling down as school reforms. If Mr. Barnes were a member of the communities of discourse that spurred these shifts or if he were provided with easy access to them, he, too, might have come to think in different ways about teaching, students, and history. Rather than being limited by the intellectual currents of the decade when he completed his master's degree, he would have grown as knowledge grew, changed as perspectives changed.

凯尔西女士同样是时代的产物。她似乎对一些我们也认同的理念情有独钟:写作中的声音表达;建构主义学习;以及帮助所有学生,而不仅仅是最聪明的学生,学习具有挑战性的内容。她似乎拥有许多年轻教师所具备的理想主义和浪漫情怀,这些年轻教师尚未经历过多年教育经验所带来的理论与实践的冲突。与其他教师讨论她的假设和信念无疑会对她有所帮助,无论是澄清和完善她的知识和信念,还是修正和完善它们。

Ms. Kelsey is likewise a child of her time. She seems enamored of ideas we also find appealing: voice in writing; constructivism in learning; and helping all students, not just the brightest, learn challenging content. She seems blessed with the idealism and romanticism of many young teachers who have not experienced the clashes of educational theory and practice that come with years of experience. Discussing her assumptions and beliefs with other teachers would undoubtedly help her, either by clarifying and sharpening her knowledge and beliefs or by altering and amending them.

结论

CONCLUSION

在列举这些不同的可能性时,我们或许已经耗尽了一些读者的耐心。提供多种方案可能会被视为犹豫不决的表现。或许我们应该把时间花在设计一些可以确定执行的练习上。如果一个工具允许做出多种选择——这些选择不仅程度不同,方向也不同——那么我们该如何评价它的有效性呢?实际上,验证过程又该如何开始呢?

In sketching out these different possibilities, we may have tried some reader's patience. Offering alternative scenarios may be taken as a sign of indecision. Maybe our time would be better spent designing exercises that can be acted upon with certainty. If an instrument allows multiple decisions—decisions differing not only in degree but in direction—what can be said about its validity? Indeed, how can the process of validation begin?

具有讽刺意味的是,我们把这些不同的情境视为一个起点。每一种情境都体现了李·J·克朗巴赫(Lee J. Cronbach)提出的“解释性视角”的效度观 64 ,该视角通过构建看待已积累研究结果的不同方式来寻求验证。套用克朗巴赫的话来说,效度并非工具的属性,而是论证的属性。每一种情境或论证都以不同的方式运用我们的数据,并最终得出不同的结论。每一种情境都为我们提供了一个扮演“魔鬼代言人”的机会,通过提出问题、质疑假设,促使我们重新思考那些我们如此珍视以至于忘记它们只是希望和愿景,而非有据可查的真理。

Ironically, we view these different scenarios as a start. Each speaks to the “explanatory perspective” on validity sketched out by Lee J. Cronbach,64 a perspective that pursues validation by formulating alternative ways to view accumulated findings. Validity, to paraphrase Cronbach, is not a property of instruments but a property of arguments. Each scenario, or argument, uses our data differently and leads to different decisions. Each offers us the chance to play devil's advocate by raising questions, questioning assumptions, and making us rethink things we prize so dearly that we forget they are hopes and aspirations, not documented truths.

毫无疑问,我们可以构建一个符合我们对优秀教学理念的单一方案。但这是一种危险的做法。即便这样的方案对我们来说很有说服力,它也仍然只是一种单一的视角。众多观点中,教学各有不同。通过描绘赋予同一数据不同意义的方式,我们旨在强调这样一个事实:不同的教学理念总是在争夺我们的支持。我们最终选择哪一种,反映了我们的价值观,以及我们对教师和孩子的期望。

No doubt we could have developed a single scenario consistent with our beliefs about good teaching. But this is a perilous way to proceed. As convincing to us as such a scenario might be, it would still be one way among many to view teaching. By sketching out different ways to attach significance to the same data, we call attention to the fact that competing images of teaching always vie for our allegiance. Choosing among them reflects what we value, what we want for our teachers and our children.

尽管我们赞同诸如美国国家专业教学标准委员会等机构提出的诸多承诺——例如,对优秀教学多元化的诠释、对以知识和技能为指导的教学实践、以及对以绩效评估作为更准确的教学指标的承诺——但我们对数据收集后的后续发展仍持谨慎态度。教学,如同凯尔西和巴恩斯在这些练习中遇到的历史一样,受制于地域和时间。即便基于此类练习产生的大量数据,评委们也很难就“更好”和“更差”的教学做出关乎生死存亡的重大决定。我们提出这一观点并非出于谴责,而是为了发出警告。正如我们难以向普通大众解释教学的复杂性一样,我们也难以向政策制定者阐明,他们关于优秀教学的决策将充满怎样的冲突和矛盾。

Although we embrace many of the commitments enunciated by organizations like the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards—commitments to multiple images of good teaching, to teaching as an enterprise informed by knowledge and skill, to using performance assessments as more accurate proxies of teaching—we leave this analysis cautious about what happens after the data are in. Teaching, like the history that Kelsey and Barnes encountered in these exercises, is bound by place and time. Judges will be hard-pressed to make high-stakes decisions about “better” and “worse” teaching even from the rich data generated by exercises like these. We offer this observation not as condemnation but as warning. Just as it is difficult to communicate the complexities of teaching to the lay public, so it will be difficult to communicate to policymakers how full of conflict, how rife with contradictions, their decisions about accomplished teaching will be.

附言

A POSTSCRIPT

我们将以一个与之前截然不同的情境来结束本次探索。之前的所有情境都基于一个几乎被忽视的基本假设:评估教学的最佳方法是评估教师个体。这一假设是现代心理测量学的基石,而新兴的绩效评估文献中鲜有对其提出挑战。65

We bring this exploration to a close with a scenario fundamentally different from those that precede it. All the previous scenarios draw on an assumption so basic it almost goes unnoticed: Each assumes that the best way to assess teaching is to assess the individual teacher. This assumption is a pillar of modern psychometrics, and there is little in the emerging literature on performance assessment that challenges it.65

但我们越是思考教师的个体评估,就越会产生更多的问题。例如,我们最感兴趣的是教学的累积效应,而不是学生在一门课程后所学到的东西。经过四年的高中学习,学生是否形成了历史思维?他们是否熟悉不同的历史视角,并能运用这些视角思考当下?课程划分是否会在学生的脑海中形成壁垒,还是教师会帮助学生将美国的发展与海外事件联系起来?66这些问题都超越了单一课程的范畴。换句话说,学生的教育体验并非每位教师努力的简单叠加,而是这些努力汇聚融合,最终形成更大成果的过程。如果…… 历史理解是多种视角的整合,是不同种类和形式知识的协调,我们难道不应该关注那些能够反映教师团队合作能力的评估,而不是那些能够反映每个教师单独能力的评估吗?

But the more we think about individual teacher assessment, the more questions we have. For example, what interests us most are the cumulative effects of teaching, not what students learn after a single course. After four years of high school, have students developed a historical cast of mind? Are they acquainted with different ways of viewing the past, and can they use them to think about the present? Do curriculum divisions become walled off in student's minds, or do teachers help students forge connections between developments in America and events beyond its shores?66 These questions all go beyond a single course. In other words, student's educational experience is not the summative value of each teacher's efforts, but rather what happens when these efforts come together and coalesce into something larger. If the sine qua non of historical understanding is the integration of multiple perspectives, the coordination of different kinds and forms of knowledge, shouldn't we look to assessments that capture what groups of teachers can do together rather than what each can do apart?

在这种教育理念中,课堂上的各个班级会以各种方式互动,从而拓展和强化某些观点,平衡和缓和另一些观点,并挑战和质疑其他观点。我们不会让学生自行辨别老师的不同观点,而是会强调这些差异,并利用它们来教导学生认识思想的差异和理性辩论。这种课程的成功取决于一群成年人能否齐心协力,汇聚各自的才能。教学本质上是一种社会活动,需要一套评估体系和相应的心理测量理论,来全面捕捉教师群体学生创造的体验。

In this image of education, classes would engage each other in ways that expand and amplify some perspectives, balance and temper others, and challenge and confront still others. We would not leave it up to students to sort out their teacher's different perspectives but would highlight these differences and use them to teach students about intellectual difference and reasoned debate. The success of such a curriculum would rest on the ability of a group of adults to join together and pool their talents. Teaching would be a fundamentally social enterprise and would demand a set of assessments, and an accompanying psychometric theory, that would capture the totality of experiences that these individuals, a faculty, create for students.

如果学校的结构如此,如果个人文件柜的意象被电子文件共享的意象(及其隐喻)所取代,我们相信,教师群体中普遍存在的智识差异将会转变为基于参与度和知识的差异。如果巴恩斯和凯尔西在这样的学校任教,我们或许不会期望巴恩斯接受女性主义历史学家的观点,也不会期望凯尔西在学生关于波士顿倾茶事件的作文上用铅笔写上“342个箱子”。但我们会期待他们之间进行健康的思想交流,不仅探讨历史知识的本质,也探讨如何激发那些可能被认为缺乏学习动力,甚至更糟,能力不足的学生的学习热情。在这样的学校里,这两位教师或许能更好地理解自己持有这些观点的原因。我们也期待,随着时间的推移,他们会找到利用彼此不同观点进行教学的方法。

If schools were so structured, if the image of the individual file cabinet gave way to the image—and metaphor—of an electronic file share, we believe that the prevailing intellectual diversity among teachers would yield to a diversity based on engagement and knowledge. If Barnes and Kelsey were to teach in such a school, we might not expect Barnes to embrace the perspectives of feminist historians nor expect Kelsey to begin penciling “342 chests” on student's essays about the Boston Tea Party. But we would expect a healthy exchange of ideas, not only about the nature of historical knowledge but also about how to engage students who might otherwise be cast as unmotivated or, worse, unable. In such a school, these two teachers might better understand why they hold the views that they do. And we would expect that over time they would discover ways to exploit their differing views for pedagogical purposes.

为教师制定新标准是一回事,创造条件让他们达到这些标准则是另一回事。要让教师大规模达到这些标准,我们所熟知的学校模式必须改变。然而,我们不禁要问,例如,有多少政策制定者会支持这样一种教学模式:教师每天三分之一的时间用于反思和持续学习他们所教授的学科?一栋为教师提供独立隔间、远离铃声和其他干扰的校舍?一种不再是循序渐进的研讨会,而是更像真正专业发展所体现的持续学习活动的教师在职培训模式?

Setting new standards for teachers is one thing; providing the conditions for their attainment quite another. For teachers to attain such standards on a vast scale, schools as we know them would have to change. Yet we wonder, for example, how many policymakers would endorse a school day in which a third of the teacher's time was devoted to reflection on and ongoing study of the discipline he or she teaches? A school building that provided teachers with carrels of their own, removed from the hubbub of ringing bells and other demands? An approach to teacher in-service that looked less like an EST seminar and more like the sustained learning activities that characterize true professional development?

这样的学校虽然不多,但确实存在。67如果它们成为常态,我们甚至可能会发现,个别评估反而会阻碍变革。因此,我们希望这些评估能够成为学校改革的中转站,而非终点。作为催化剂,表现性评估或许能够引导我们关注教师之间相互学习、互惠互利的社群。当这种情况发生时,个别评估将失去其存在的意义,并被纳入我们未来的变革浪潮之中。

Schools like these are few, but they do exist.67 If they were to become the norm, we might even find individually administered assessments playing a role that thwarted change. Our hope, then, is that these assessments will become a way station in school reform, not its terminus. Acting as a catalyst, performance assessments might lead us to focus on communities in which teachers learn and benefit from each other. When this happens, individual assessments will have outlived their purpose and will be swept up in the changes that are our future.

笔记

NOTES

本章是我与苏珊娜·威尔逊(Suzanne Wilson)基于我们在斯坦福大学的共同研究经验撰写的最后一篇文章。它发表于1993年冬季刊的《美国教育研究杂志》(第30卷,第729-770页)。许多人对本文的早期草稿提出了意见,包括:希尔达·博尔科(Hilda Borko)、杰里·布罗菲(Jere Brophy)、厄尔·巴特菲尔德(Earl Butterfield)、拉里·库班(Larry Cuban)、珍妮丝·富尼耶(Janice Fournier)、帕姆·格罗斯曼(Pam Grossman)、玛丽·肯尼迪(Mary Kennedy)、盖亚·莱因哈特(Gaea Leinhardt)、丹·珀尔斯坦(Dan Perlstein)、黛博拉·麦卡琴(Deborah McCutchen)、苏·诺伦(Sue Nolen)、彼得·塞克斯(Peter Seixas)和罗杰·索德(Roger Soder)。由于我们只采纳了其中的一些建议,因此本文内容由我们全权负责。我们还要感谢李·舒尔曼(Lee Shulman),他始终如一的学术指导激励我们完成了这项分析。本文发表几年后,我又发表了一篇关于绩效评估的社会用途的文章。参见 Samuel Wineburg,“T. S. Eliot、合作与快速变化的世界中的评估困境”,Phi Delta Kappan 79 (1997),59–65 ( http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kwin9709.htm )。

 

This chapter represents the final piece I wrote with Suzanne Wilson based on our joint research experience at Stanford University. It appeared in the Winter 1993 issue of the American Educational Research Journal (vol. 30, pp. 729–70). Many people commented on previous drafts of this article: Hilda Borko, Jere Brophy, Earl Butterfield, Larry Cuban, Janice Fournier, Pam Grossman, Mary Kennedy, Gaea Leinhardt, Dan Perlstein, Deborah McCutchen, Sue Nolen, Peter Seixas, and Roger Soder. Because we heeded only some of their suggestions, we alone are responsible for the content. We also thank Lee Shulman, whose enduring intellectual company inspired us to finish this analysis. Several years after this article appeared, I published a second article on the social uses of performance assessments. See Samuel Wineburg, “T. S. Eliot, Collaboration, and the Quandaries of Assessment in a Rapidly Changing World” Phi Delta Kappan 79 (1997), 59–65 (http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kwin9709.htm).

 

1. Edward H. Haertel,“评估教学功能”,《教育应用测量》 1 (1988),99-107;T. J. Quirk、B. J. Witten和 S. F. Weinberg,“国家教师考试同时效度和预测效度研究综述”,《教育研究评论》 43 (1974),89-113;Linda Darling-Hammond,“疯狂的教学测试”,载于 B. Gross 和 R. Gross 编,《伟大的学校辩论》 (纽约,1985)。

1. Edward H. Haertel, “Assessing the Teaching Function” Applied Measurement in Education 1 (1988), 99–107; T. J. Quirk, B. J. Witten, and S. F. Weinberg, “Review of Studies of the Concurrent and Predictive Validity of the National Teacher Examination” Review of Educational Research 43 (1974), 89–113; Linda Darling-Hammond, “Mad Hatter Tests of Teaching” in B. Gross and R. Gross, eds., The Great School Debate (New York, 1985).

2. Edward H. Haertel,“教师评估的新形式”,载于 Gerald Grant 编辑的《教育研究评论》,第 17(华盛顿特区,1991 年),第 3-29 页。

2. Edward H. Haertel, “New Forms of Teacher Assessment” in Gerald Grant, ed., Review of Research in Education, vol. 17 (Washington, D.C., 1991), 3–29.

3.参见 B. Berry 和 R. Ginsberg,“培养优秀教师:从政策到实施”,Phi Delta Kappan 71 (1990),616–21。

3. See B. Berry and R. Ginsberg, “Creating Lead Teachers: From Policy to Implementation” Phi Delta Kappan 71 (1990), 616–21.

4. Lorrie A. Shepard 和 A. E. Kreitzer,“德克萨斯州教师考试”教育研究者16 (1987),22-31。

4. Lorrie A. Shepard and A. E. Kreitzer, “The Texas Teacher Test” Educational Researcher 16 (1987), 22–31.

5.参见 B. Davey,“通过使用绩效评估任务来评价教师能力:概述”,《教育人员评估杂志》 5 (1991),121-32;Barbara W. Grover,“教师评估困境:现状与应有状态!”,《教育人员评估杂志》 5 (1991),103-19。

5. See B. Davey, “Evaluating Teacher Competence Through the Use of Performance Assessment Tasks: An Overview” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 5 (1991), 121–32; Barbara W. Grover, “The Teacher Assessment Dilemma: What Is Versus What Ought To Be!” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 5 (1991), 103–19.

6.达林-哈蒙德, 《疯帽子》。

6. Darling-Hammond, “Mad Hatter.”

7.同上,第 532 页

7. Ibid., 532.

8.国家专业教学标准委员会,《迈向教师职业的高标准和严格标准:国家专业教学标准委员会的初步政策和观点》底特律,1989 年)。

8. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Toward High and Rigorous Standards for the Teaching Profession: Initial Policies and Perspectives of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (Detroit, 1989).

9.参见 Holmes Group,《明日学校:专业发展学校设计原则》(密歇根州东兰辛,1990 年);卡内基教育与经济论坛,《一个准备就绪的国家:21 世纪的教师》(纽约,1986 年);Nel Noddings,“职业中的女权主义批判”,载于 C. B. Cazden 主编,《教育研究评论》,第 16 卷(华盛顿特区,1990 年),第 393-424 页。

9. See Holmes Group, Tomorrow's Schools: Principles for the Design of Professional Development Schools (East Lansing, Mich., 1990); Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century (New York, 1986); Nel Noddings, “Feminist Critiques in the Professions” in C. B. Cazden, ed., Review of Research in Education, vol. 16 (Washington, D.C., 1990), 393–424.

10. B. F. Skinner,“学习的科学与教学的艺术”,《哈佛教育评论》 24 (1954),91。

10. B. F. Skinner, “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching” Harvard Educational Review 24 (1954), 91.

11. Gaea Leinhardt,“数学教学专业知识”,教育领导》 43(1986),28-33。

11. Gaea Leinhardt, “Expertise in Mathematics Teaching” Educational Leadership 43 (1986), 28–33.

12. James C. Greeno,“思考的视角”,美国心理学家》44(1989),134-41。

12. James C. Greeno, “A Perspective on Thinking” American Psychologist 44 (1989), 134–41.

13. Lee S. Shulman,“理解者教书:教学中的知识增长”,教育研究者》 15(1986),4-14。

13. Lee S. Shulman, “Those Who Understand Teach: Knowledge Growth in Teaching” Educational Researcher 15 (1986), 4–14.

14. David C. Berliner,“寻找专家教育家”,教育研究者》 15,第7期(1986年),5-13页。

14. David C. Berliner, “In Search of the Expert Pedagogue” Educational Researcher 15, no. 7 (1986), 5–13.

15. Annemarie Palincsar 和 Ann Brown,“理解促进和理解监控活动的互惠教学”认知与教学1 (1984),117–75。

15. Annemarie Palincsar and Ann Brown, “Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities” Cognition and Instruction 1 (1984), 117–75.

16. Allan Collins、Jan Hawkins 和 Sharon M. Carver,“为弱势学生提供认知学徒制”,载于 Barbara Means、Carol Chelemer 和 Michael Knapp 编,《向有风险的学生教授高级技能》(旧金山,1991 年),第 216-243 页。

16. Allan Collins, Jan Hawkins, and Sharon M. Carver, “A Cognitive Apprenticeship for Disadvantaged Students” in Barbara Means, Carol Chelemer, and Michael Knapp, eds., Teaching Advanced Skills to At-Risk Students (San Francisco, 1991), 216–43.

17. TAP 的首席研究员是 Lee S. Shulman。在四年的发展历程中,TAP 发布了一百多篇文章、技术报告和其他文件。本文所述的每项练习在 TAP 技术报告中都有更详细的描述,其中包括完整的评分指南、管理员须知、考生须知以及练习材料副本。

17. The principal investigator for TAP was Lee S. Shulman. During its four-year history, TAP issued over a hundred articles, technical reports, and other documents. Each of the exercises described here is described more fully in a TAP technical report, which includes a full scoring guide, instructions to administrators, instructions to candidates, and copies of exercise materials.

18.参见 Joan Baratz-Snowden,“绩效评估以识别优秀教师:国家专业教学标准委员会制定其研究和发展路线”,《教育人员评估杂志5(1991),133-45;国家专业教学标准委员会,《高标准和严格的标准》

18. See Joan Baratz-Snowden, “Performance Assessment for Identifying Excellent Teachers: The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Charts Its Research and Development Course” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 5 (1991), 133–45; National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, High and Rigorous Standards.

19. Lee S. Shulman 和 Gary Sykes,“国家教师委员会:寻求一个大胆的标准”,为教师职业工作组准备的论文(马里兰州海厄茨维尔:卡内基教育与经济论坛,1986 年 5 月)

19. Lee S. Shulman and Gary Sykes, “A National Board for Teaching: In Search of a Bold Standard” paper prepared for the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession (Hyattsville, Md.: Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, May 1986).

20.参见 Angelo Collins,“生物教师评估档案袋”,《教育人员评估杂志5 (1991),147–67;Rick Marks,“教学内容知识:从数学案例到修正概念”,《教师教育杂志》 41 (1990),3–11;Kenneth Wolf,“学校教师档案袋:设计、实施和评估中的问题”,《Phi Delta Kappan》 73 (1991),129–36。

20. See Angelo Collins, “Portfolios for Biology Teacher Assessment” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education 5 (1991), 147–67; Rick Marks, “Pedagogical Content Knowledge: From a Mathematical Case to a Modified Conception” Journal of Teacher Education 41 (1990), 3–11; Kenneth Wolf, “The Schoolteacher's Portfolio: Issues in Design, Implementation, and Evaluation” Phi Delta Kappan 73 (1991), 129–36.

21.请参阅本书第 7 章

21. See Chapter 7 in this volume.

22.参见舒尔曼,《那些理解的人》4-14页,以及李·舒尔曼,《知识与教学:新改革的基础》,载哈佛教育评论》 57 (1987), 1–22;Pamela L. Grossman、Suzanne M. Wilson 和 Lee S. Shulman,“实质性教师:教学的学科知识”,载于 M. C. Reynolds 编,《新教师的知识基础》 (纽约,1989 年),23–36;Suzanne M. Wilson、Lee Shulman 和 Anna E. Richert,“‘150 种不同的认知方式’:教学中的知识表征”,载于 James Calderhead 编,《探索教师的思维》(伦敦,1987 年),104–24。

22. See Shulman, “Those Who Understand” 4–14, and Lee Shulman, “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform” Harvard Educational Review 57 (1987), 1–22; Pamela L. Grossman, Suzanne M. Wilson, and Lee S. Shulman, “Teachers of Substance: Subject Matter Knowledge for Teaching” in M. C. Reynolds, ed., Knowledge Base for the Beginning Teacher (New York, 1989), 23–36; Suzanne M. Wilson, Lee Shulman, and Anna E. Richert, “‘150 Different Way’ of Knowing: Representations of Knowledge in Teaching” in James Calderhead, ed., Exploring Teacher's Thinking (London, 1987), 104–24.

23.参见美国国家历史教育中心,“教师历史学术准备”,美国国家历史教育中心通讯1(1991 年),4、10。

23. See National Center for History in the Schools, “Teacher's Academic Preparation in History” National Center for History in the Schools Newsletter 1 (1991), 4, 10.

24.同上

24. Ibid.

25.有关历史中的其他六个练习和小学数学中的九个练习的描述,请参阅 Lee Shulman、Edward H. Haertel 和 Tom Bird 的迈向教学的替代评估:进展中的工作报告》(加利福尼亚州帕洛阿尔托,1988 年)。

25. See Lee Shulman, Edward H. Haertel, and Tom Bird, Toward Alternative Assessments of Teaching: A Report of Work in Progress (Palo Alto, Calif., 1988), for a description of the other six exercises in history and the nine exercises in elementary math.

26.同样,我们没有计算评分者间一致性或Cohen's Kappa系数,因为我们的判断并非代码或评分的比较,而是解释的比较。在这方面,我们赞同Donna S. Sabers、K. S. Cushing和David C. Berliner在《美国教育研究杂志》 28 (1991), 70页发表的论文“教师在具有同时性、多维性和即时性的任务中的差异”,他们认为“在分配数字方面的一致性与研究人员对忠实描述数据的命题的一致性一样,都具有主观性”。

26. Likewise, we have not calculated an interrater agreement or Cohen's Kappa for our judgments because they were not comparisons of codes or ratings but comparisons of interpretations. In this sense, we concur with Donna S. Sabers, K. S. Cushing, and David C. Berliner, “Differences Among Teachers in a Task Characterized by Simultaneity, Multidimensionality, and Immediacy” American Educational Research Journal 28 (1991), 70, who argue that “agreement in assigning numbers is no less subjective than agreement of researchers about propositions that faithfully describe the data.”

27. Suzanne M. Wilson 和 Louette McGraw,《学生论文评估》,历史,技术报告编号H-3(加利福尼亚州帕洛阿尔托,1989 年)。

27. Suzanne M. Wilson and Louette McGraw, Evaluation of Student Papers, History, Tech. Rep. No. H-3 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1989).

28.例如,参见 Berliner,“专家教育家”;Gaea Leinhardt 和 James G. Greeno,“教学的认知技能”,《教育心理学杂志》 78 (1986),75–95;Ralph T. Putnam,“为学生构建和调整内容:一项关于现场和模拟辅导的研究”,《美国教育研究杂志》 24 (1987),13–48;Sabers、Cushing 和 Berliner,“教师之间的差异”。

28. See, for example, Berliner, “Expert Pedagogue”; Gaea Leinhardt and James G. Greeno, “The Cognitive Skill of Teaching” Journal of Educational Psychology 78 (1986), 75–95; Ralph T. Putnam, “Structuring and Adjusting Content for Students: A Study of Live and Simulated Tutoring Addition” American Educational Research Journal 24 (1987), 13–48; Sabers, Cushing, and Berliner, “Differences Among Teachers.”

29. Joseph J. Schwab,“探究与阅读过程”,载于 Ian Westbury 和 Neil J. Wilkof 编,《科学、课程与博雅教育》1958 年;重印版,芝加哥,1978 年),第 149-163 页。

29. Joseph J. Schwab, “Enquiry and the Reading Process” in Ian Westbury and Neil J. Wilkof, eds., Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education (1958; reprint ed., Chicago, 1978), 149–63.

30. John McGreevy 和 Lawrence Hyink,《文献历史练习》技术报告编号H-1(加利福尼亚州帕洛阿尔托,1989 年)。

30. John McGreevy and Lawrence Hyink, Documentary History Exercise, Tech. Rep. No. H-1 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1989).

31.在来到评估中心体验“小组合作”练习之前,巴恩斯从未听说过阿伦森的“拼图教学法”,正如他在其他场合的评论所表明的那样:“我来这里之前从未想到过这种方法,那就是运用拼图教学法。”简而言之,这是一种让学生学习不同内容,然后在小组环境中整合学习成果的策略。参见埃利奥特·阿伦森,《拼图课堂》(加利福尼亚州比佛利山庄,1978年)。

31. Until he came to the assessment center and experienced the “Cooperative Small Groups” exercise, Barnes had not heard of Aronson's “jigsaw technique” as his comments elsewhere attest: “A secondary way, which I would not have thought of until I came here, would be to use this jigsaw technique.” Briefly, this is a strategy in which individuals learn different content and pool their learning in a group setting. See Elliot Aronson, The Jigsaw Classroom (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1978).

32.舒尔曼,《那些理解的人》

32. Shulman, “Those Who Understand.”

33.将教学内容知识的视角重新审视练习1,可以为我们提供另一个角度。教学的一个重要方面是懂得如何提供反馈以促进学生作业的改进。具体性通常被视为关键,而懂得如何“提供反馈”则从……开始。当问题从“如何让这篇文章更好”转变为“如何让这篇文章成为一篇更好的历史写作”时,我们注意到两位教师在对学生论文的书面评语的具体程度上存在显著差异,尤其是在历史内容方面。

33. Turning the lens of pedagogical content knowledge back on Exercise 1 provides another perspective on that exercise. An important aspect of teaching is knowing how to provide feedback that leads to improvements in student's work. Specificity is often viewed as key, and knowing how to “provide feedback” goes from general pedagogical knowledge to pedagogical content knowledge when the question moves from “how can you make this a better essay” to “how can you make this a better piece of historical writing.” We noted a dramatic difference between the two teachers when it came to the specificity of their written comments on student's papers, particularly with respect to issues of historical content.

34. Samuel Wineburg 和 Deborah Kerdeman,《教科书分析,历史》(技术报告编号H-7,(加利福尼亚州帕洛阿尔托,1989 年)。

34. Samuel Wineburg and Deborah Kerdeman, Textbook Analysis, History (Tech. Rep. No. H-7, (Palo Alto, Calif., 1989).

35. Paul Todd 和 Merle Curti,《美国民族的崛起》佛罗里达州奥兰多,1982 年)。

35. Paul Todd and Merle Curti, Rise of the American Nation (Orlando, Fla., 1982).

36. Suzanne M. Wilson, 《理解历史理解:学科知识与美国历史教学》斯坦福大学博士论文,1988 年)。

36. Suzanne M. Wilson, Understanding Historical Understanding: Subject Matter Knowledge and the Teaching of U.S. History (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1988).

37.凯尔西在这里指的是美国历史学家南希·科特,她是女性的纽带》(纽黑文,1977 年)和《苦涩的根源》(纽约,1975 年)等作品的作者。

37. Here Kelsey refers to the Americanist Nancy Cott, author of such works as Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, 1977) and Root of Bitterness (New York, 1975).

38. Todd 和 Curti,崛起》,98-99。

38. Todd and Curti, Rise, 98–99.

39.同上,第 109 页

39. Ibid., 109.

40.同上,第 106 页

40. Ibid., 106.

41.表格上的问题允许教师有一定的回答自由度,教师的回答在某些方面有所重叠,但在其他方面则不然。例如,“文本与社会研究技能”一栏的提示是:“文本及其配套的教师指南(包括练习题)是促进还是阻碍了社会研究技能(例如,地图阅读、图表理解、数据评估、原始资料、原创艺术作品等)的发展?[请在适当情况下注明页码]” 教师可以自由回答任何或所有补充材料,但在某些情况下,他们会被引导至特定的页面和示例。

41. The questions on the form allowed for some leeway in response, and the teacher's responses overlapped at some points but not others. For example, the prompt under “The text and social studies skills” was phrased: “Does the text and accompanying teacher's guides (including the worksheets) help or hinder the development of social studies skills (e.g., map reading, understanding of charts and figures, evaluating data, primary sources, original art work, etc.)? [cite page numbers when appropriate]” Teachers were free to respond to any or all of the supplementary materials, but in some cases they were directed to specific pages and examples.

42.参见John A. Scott,“历史文学与民主教育”,历史教师》25(1992),153-73。

42. See John A. Scott, “Historical Literature and Democratic Education” History Teacher 25 (1992), 153–73.

43.参见 Suzanne M. Wilson 和 Samuel S. Wineburg 的论文“使用基于表现的练习来衡量历史教师的教学内容知识”,该论文发表于 1991 年 4 月在芝加哥举行的美国教育研究协会年会;Samuel S. Wineburg《以候选人为中心的教学评估方法》 ,技术报告编号H-15(加利福尼亚州帕洛阿尔托,1989 年);以及 Samuel S. Wineburg 的论文“关于基于表现的教学评估的未解之谜:一个案例研究”,该论文发表于 1991 年 4 月在芝加哥举行的美国教育研究协会年会。

43. See Suzanne M. Wilson and Samuel S. Wineburg, “Using Performance-Based Exercises to Measure the Pedagogical Content Knowledge of History Teachers” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 1991; Samuel S. Wineburg, A Candidate-Centered Approach to the Assessment of Teaching, Tech. Rep. No. H-15 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1989); and Samuel S. Wineburg, “Unanswered Questions About Performance-Based Assessments of Teaching: A Case Study” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 1991.

44.参见琳达·弗劳尔,《写作中的问题解决策略》纽约,1981 年)。

44. See Linda Flower, Problem Solving Strategies in Writing (New York, 1981).

45. Palincsar 和 Brown,“互惠式教学”;David J. Wood、Jerome S. Bruner 和 G. Ross,“辅导在解决问题中的作用”,儿童心理学和精神病学杂志》 17 (1976),89-100。

45. Palincsar and Brown, “Reciprocal Teaching”; David J. Wood, Jerome S. Bruner, and G. Ross, “The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 17 (1976), 89–100.

46.参见迈克尔·卡门,《我们面前的过去:美国当代历史写作》(伊萨卡,1980 年);彼得·诺维克,《那个高尚的梦想:“客观性问题”与美国历史学界》(英国剑桥,1988 年)。

46. See Michael Kammen, The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, 1980); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question ” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, England, 1988).

47. Peter Seixas,“平行危机:历史与社会研究课程”,课程研究杂志》 25(1993),235-50,引文出自第237-38页。

47. Peter Seixas, “Parallel Crises: History and the Social Studies Curriculum” Journal of Curriculum Studies 25(1993), 235–50, quotation from pp. 237–38.

48.参见 Robert F. Berkhofer,“诗学对(正常)历史实践的挑战”,《今日诗学》 9(1988),435-52;William Cronon,“故事的容身之处:自然、历史和叙事”,美国历史杂志》 78(1992),1347-76。

48. See Robert F. Berkhofer, “The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice,” Poetics Today 9 (1988), 435–52; William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” Journal of American History 78 (1992), 1347–76.

49.克罗农, 《故事之地》。

49. Cronon, “A Place for Stories.”

50.例如,参见 Henry Steele Commager,“历史学家应该做出道德判断吗?” 《美国遗产》 17 (1966),92-93。

50. See for example Henry Steele Commager, “Should the Historian Make Moral Judgments?” American Heritage 17 (1966), 92–93.

51. Kammen,《我们之前的过去》

51. Kammen, Past Before Us.

52.我们感谢 Peter Seixas 帮助我们理解了这一点的重要性。

52. We thank Peter Seixas for helping us understand the importance of this point.

53.这种课程差异化构成了詹姆斯·B·康南特改革美国教育计划的基础。参见詹姆斯·B·康南特,美国教师的教育》 (纽约,1963年);以及罗伯特·L·汉佩尔在《最后的堡垒》(波士顿,1986年)中对“康南特计划”的精辟分析,尤其是第3章。

53. Such curriculum differentiation formed the basis of James B. Conant's plan to reform American education. See James B. Conant, The Education of American Teachers (New York, 1963); and see Robert L. Hampel's keen analysis of the “Conant Plan” in The Last Little Citadel (Boston, 1986), especially ch. 3.

54. J. H. Hiller,“概念模糊性的言语反应指标”,《美国教育研究杂志》 8 (1971),151-61。

54. J. H. Hiller, “Verbal Response Indicators of Conceptual Vagueness,” American Educational Research Journal 8 (1971), 151–61.

55.例如,参见 Jeannie Oakes 的追踪:学校如何构建不平等》(纽黑文,1985 年)。

55. See for example Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, 1985).

56. Roland G. Tharp 和 Ronald Gallimore,“唤醒学校活力”,《美国教育家》 13 (1989),20-25,46-52。

56. Roland G. Tharp and Ronald Gallimore, “Rousing Schools to Life,” American Educator 13 (1989), 20–25, 46–52.

57.加州州立教育部,《加州公立学校 K-12 数学课程框架》(萨克拉门托,1985 年)和《加州公立学校 K-12 历史社会科学框架》(萨克拉门托,1988 年);霍姆斯集团,《明日学校》;全国数学教师委员会,《学校数学课程和评估标准》(弗吉尼亚州雷斯顿,1989 年);西奥多·R·西泽,《霍勒斯的学校:重新设计美国高中》(波士顿,1992 年)。

57. California State Department of Education, Mathematics Curriculum Framework for California Public Schools, K-12 (Sacramento, 1985), and History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools, K-12 (Sacramento, 1988); Holmes Group, Tomorrow's Schools; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (Reston, Va., 1989); Theodore R. Sizer, Horace's School: Redesigning the American High School (Boston, 1992).

58. Larry Cuban,“持续教学:1900-1980 年的高中课堂”,Phi Delta Kappan 64 (1982),113-18;John I. Goodlad,《学校》(纽约,1984 年)。

58. Larry Cuban, “Persistent Instruction: The High School Classroom 1900–1980” Phi Delta Kappan 64 (1982), 113–18; John I. Goodlad, A Place Called School (New York, 1984).

59. Diane R. Ravitch 和 Chester E. Finn, Jr.,《我们的 17 岁青少年知道什么?关于第一次全国历史和文学评估的报告》(纽约,1987 年)。

59. Diane R. Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York, 1987).

60.参见T.S. Hamerow 《历史与历史学家的反思》(麦迪逊,1987年);Gertrude Himmelfarb,《新历史与旧历史》纽约,1987年)。

60. See T. S. Hamerow, Reflections on History and Historians (Madison, 1987); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (New York, 1987).

61.感谢 Jere Brophy 让我们注意到这一点

61. I thank Jere Brophy for bringing this point to our attention.

62. “重新审视欧洲”社会研究评论2(1992 年秋季)

62. “Europe Reconsidered” Social Studies Review 2 (Fall 1992).

63.参见 Lauren B. Resnick 和 Daniel P. Resnick,“评估思维课程:教育改革的新工具”,载于 Bernard R. Gifford 和 Mary C. O'sConnor编,《改变评估:能力、成就和教学的替代观点》(波士顿,1991 年),第 37-75 页。

63. See Lauren B. Resnick and Daniel P. Resnick, “Assessing the Thinking Curriculum: New Tools for Educational Reform” in Bernard R. Gifford and Mary C. O'sConnor, eds., Changing Assessments: Alternative Views of Aptitude, Achievement and Instruction (Boston, 1991), 37–75.

64. Lee J. Cronbach,“关于有效性论证的五种观点”,载于 Howard Wainer 和 Henry I. Braun 编,《测验有效性》新泽西州希尔赛德,1988 年),第 3-18 页。

64. Lee J. Cronbach, “Five Perspectives on the Validity Argument” in Howard Wainer and Henry I. Braun, eds., Test Validity (Hillside, N.J., 1988), 3–18.

65.参见 Richard J. Stiggins 和 Barbara Plake 编辑的《绩效评估》[特刊],《教育应用测量4,第4 期(1991 年)。

65. See Richard J. Stiggins and Barbara Plake, eds., “Performance Assessment” [special issue], Applied Measurement in Education 4, no. 4 (1991).

66.参见 Paul Gagnon,“为什么要学习历史?” 大西洋月刊》,第176 期(1988 年),第 43-66 页。

66. See Paul Gagnon, “Why Study History?” Atlantic Monthly, no. 176 (1988), 43–66.

67.参见 Deborah Meier,“重塑教学”,《教师学院记录》 93 (1992),594–609;Sizer,《霍勒斯的学校》关于工作场所教师专业发展的例子,参见 Sam Wineburg 和 Pam Grossman,《跨学科课程:实施的挑战》(纽约,2000);以及 Pam Grossman、Sam Wineburg 和 Steve Woolworth,“追求教师共同体”,《教师学院记录》(即将出版)。

67. See Deborah Meier, “Reinventing Teaching, ”Teachers College Record 93 (1992), 594–609; Sizer, Horace's School. For an example of teacher professional development in the workplace, see Sam Wineburg and Pam Grossman, Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Challenges to Implementation (New York, 2000); and Pam Grossman, Sam Wineburg, and Steve Woolworth, “In Pursuit of Teacher Community” Teachers College Record (in press).

第四

IV

历史即国家记忆

HISTORY AS NATIONAL MEMORY

9

9

迷失在言语中

Lost in Words

历史课堂中的道德模糊性

Moral Ambiguity in the History Classroom

流行文化为我们提供了大量令人昏昏欲睡的历史课堂的典型画面。在1986年上映的青少年电影《春天不是读书天》中,老师以一段独白开始了缓慢的讲课:

Popular culture provides us with stock images of mind-numbing history classrooms. The teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, an adolescent movie released in 1986, begins his tortoise-paced lecture with the following soliloquy:

1930年,共和党控制的众议院试图缓解——有人知道吗?——大萧条的影响。他们通过了——有人知道吗?——关税法案。霍利-斯穆特关税法案——有人知道是提高了还是降低了关税吗?——该法案提高了关税,试图为联邦政府增加收入。它奏效了吗?有人知道吗?有人知道结果吗?它并没有奏效,美国陷入了大萧条的泥潭。今天,我们又在就此展开类似的辩论?有人知道这是什么吗?课堂上有人知道吗?有人知道吗?有人知道吗?有人见过拉弗曲线吗?

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives endeavored to alleviate the effects of the—anyone? anyone?—Great Depression. Pass the—anyone? anyone?—the tariff bill. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which—anyone? raised or lowered?—raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenues for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work and the United States sank deeply into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this? Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before, the Laffer Curve?

这段简短的摘录生动地展现了社会上糟糕(愤世嫉俗者或许会称之为“典型”)的历史老师的所有特征:单调乏味的讲解,强迫学生穿越历史,戴着眼镜、唯唯诺诺的老师发表着苏格拉底式的独白,黑板上密密麻麻地写满了无关紧要的笔记——所有事实都要被匆匆记下,然后迅速抹去。学生们则沉默不语,眼神空洞,少数人在潦草地记笔记,大多数人则打着哈欠,百无聊赖。无论这种形象是如何形成的——是源于痛苦的经历,还是媒体的反复渲染——它显然已成为社会集体想象的一部分。

This brief excerpt illustrates all of the features of society's bad (cynics might claim “typical”) history teacher. The monotone presentation. The forced march through the past. The bespectacled Caspar Milquetoast figure delivering a Socratic monologue. The blackboard teeming with inconsequential notes—all facts to be briefly committed to memory and expunged with the same haste. The students, for their part, sit mute and glassy-eyed, a few scribbling notes but most yawning in boredom. However this image got there—through bitter experience or sheer media repetition—it is clearly part of society's collective imagination.

毫无疑问,有些老师就像费里斯·布勒的历史老师一样。¹还有一些老师,或许在我们容易忽略的地方,与这种刻板印象形成了鲜明的对比。理查德·斯廷森就是如此。²所在的高中,从乏味的州政府规定的课程,到单调的工业绿教室墙壁,再到“普通”学生和职业教育学生的混杂,以及学校位于旧金山南部破败的工人阶级社区,所有这些条件都无法表明他的班级与众不同。事实上,就其外在特征而言,它与大众文学和学术文献中描述的那些低抱负、低期望的场所的特征完全吻合。³

No doubt there are teachers who resemble Ferris Bueller's history instructor.1 But there are other teachers, perhaps in places we might overlook, who provide a striking contrast to the caricature. Such is the case with Richard Stinson.2 None of the conditions in his high school, from the uninspired state-mandated curriculum, to the drab industrial-green walls of his classroom, to the mixture of “regular” and vocational ed youth who are his students, to the location of the school in a rundown working class neighborhood south of San Francisco would earmark his class as one that departs from the ordinary. Indeed, in terms of its outward characteristics it matches the attributes of low-aspiration, low-expectation venues recognizable from the popular as well as the scholarly literatures.3

但理查德·斯廷森并非普通的教育家。他拥有十七年的教学经验,从大学历史专业一路走来,最终成为瑟蒙德高中的社会研究系主任。在此过程中,他逐渐意识到,历史对学生的影响远不及他自己——他成长于传教士家庭,曾游历世界各地。他明白,在引导学生深入探讨复杂的宪法或州权问题之前,首先必须抓住他们的注意力。他必须帮助他们认识到,历史的遥远性只是一层外壳,其下隐藏着至关重要的永恒议题。这种信念并非一种教育信条或抽象的教学理念。斯廷森在瑟蒙德高中以打破常规的教学方式而闻名,他愿意尝试非常规的教学方法,以激发学生对十一年级美国历史的兴趣——这门学科通常即使在该校其他教师中也鲜有人问津。

But Richard Stinson is not the ordinary pedagogue. With seventeen years teaching experience, he has traveled a long path from his college history major to his stewardship as chair of the Social Studies Department at Thurmund High School. Along the way he came to understand that the past would not grip students in the same way that it had gripped him, growing up as the son of missionaries and traveling to remote corners of the globe. He knew that before he could thrust students into complicated issues of constitutional law or states rights, he would first have to capture their attention. He would have to help them see the remoteness of the past as an outer shell beneath which lay enduring issues of burning importance. This belief was more than a pedagogic creed or an abstract teaching philosophy. Stinson had earned a reputation at Thurmund as a break-the-mold teacher, willing to do the unconventional to inspire student interest in eleventh-grade U.S. history, a subject that typically aroused little interest even among other teachers at the same school.

以下这节课发生在1986年12月,当时正值罗纳德·里根秘密向尼加拉瓜反政府武装输送资金的丑闻被曝光之际,而斯廷森的课堂也正值为期两周的观察学习期间。斯廷森参与了一项旨在了解优秀教师专业知识的研究项目;他是由同事、行政人员、学区工作人员以及学生本人提名的。以下案例研究凸显了一个事实:即使在一位杰出教师的指导下,历史教学的核心问题也很容易自行发展演变,即使我们竭尽全力也无济于事。

The following class session took place during a two-week observational sequence in Stinson's classroom in December 1986, at the time when Ronald Reagan's secret funneling of money to the Nicaraguan Contras was being revealed. Stinson was a participant in a research project aimed at understanding the expertise of skilled practitioners; he had been nominated by peers, administrators, district personnel, and students themselves. The following case study highlights the fact that even in the hands of an exemplary teacher, the issues at the heart of history teaching can easily take on a life of their own, defying our best and most valiant attempts to fix their course.

对峙

THE CONFRONTATION

理查德·斯廷森十七年的教学生涯中,没有任何事能让他为周三上午的这堂课做好准备——当然,之前两节课的进行也完全出乎他的意料,那两节课几乎都按计划进行。这节课是美国政府成立单元的第三节,通常是三节课中最直接的一节。和以往一样,斯廷森计划讨论昨天的活动:一个由他的十一年级学生两天前构思、前一天玩过的游戏。他打算帮助学生思考这个游戏——尤其是其中体现的权力斗争和妥协——与美国社会中类似力量的相似之处。他还打算引导他们思考一篇周末要交的论文,题目是“我们创造的游戏与美国社会中人们的共同生活之间有什么相似之处?”

Nothing in Richard Stinson's seventeen-year teaching career prepared him for class that Wednesday morning—certainly not the two previous lessons in the sequence, which had gone pretty much as planned. This lesson, the third in the opening unit on the formation of the American government, was usually the most straightforward of the three. As in the past, Stinson planned to discuss yesterday's activity, a game conceived by his eleventh-graders two days before and played by them the previous day. He planned to help students think about the parallels between this game—especially the power struggles and compromises that characterized it—and similar forces at work in American society. He would also help them think about an essay due at the end of the week on the question “What are the parallels between the game we created and people living together in U.S. society?”

他之前教过这单元很多次,发现即使效果不佳,也依然有效。虽然他在花园岭生活多年,目睹了许多变迁——从一个稳定的白人中产阶级家庭居住的郊区,变成了一个种族多元化、租房者多于房主的社区——但这一项作业却始终如一。他从过去的经验中得知,这能为学生提供一个强有力的隐喻,帮助他们理解“关键时期”的动荡——即殖民者在约克镇取得胜利到费城宪法起草之间那段紧张而充满不确定性的时期。

He had taught this unit many times before and found that even when it “bombed” it worked. Although he had seen many changes during his years in Garden Ridge, watching it turn from a stable bedroom community of white, middle-class families to an ethnically diverse community in which renters outnumbered homeowners, this assignment remained a constant. From past experience he knew that it provided students with a powerful metaphor for understanding the turbulence of the “Critical Period” that tense and uncertain time between the colonist's victory at Yorktown and the drafting of the Constitution in Philadelphia.

斯廷森老师周三的计划是让第二节课的“将军课”学生回顾昨天的课程——这无疑是本学年最不寻常的五十分钟。周二上课时,学生们把书放在桌子上,穿上外套,然后走到学校的网球场。在那里,他给每组学生发了一袋器材——两支羽毛球拍、一个飞盘、一个软球、几个乒乓球,还有粉笔和黑板——并重申了他们必须遵守的唯一规则:他们可以随意使用这些器材,只要能想办法用到一件器材就行。

Stinson's plan for this Wednesday was to ask his second-period “generals” class to review yesterday's session, easily the most unusual fifty minutes of the school year. When they came to class on Tuesday, students placed their books on their desks, put on their jackets, and went outside to the school tennis courts. There he gave each side a bag of equipment—two badminton racquets, a Frisbee, a Nerf ball, and several ping pong balls along with chalk and a blackboard—and repeated the only rule they had to keep: They could do anything they wanted with this equipment as long as they found some way to use every piece of it.

这堂课上发生的事情和之前很多次一样:一群精力旺盛的青少年,兴奋地逃离教室,冲进网球场,准备开打。他们迅速复习了前一天的规则,然后就开始了。但没过多久,他们就发现这些规则不够用,于是开始自行调整。大多数学生都没带球拍和球,只能站在那里干瞪眼。他们漫无目的地在场边看着同伴们玩得不亦乐乎。这些旁观者开始与更积极的参与者协商,提出调整建议并引入新规则,所有这些都是为了让更多的人参与进来。

What happened during this class recapitulated what had happened many times before: a group of highly energetic adolescents, thrilled about abandoning the classroom, burst on to the tennis court ready to play. They quickly reviewed the rules from the previous day and began. But before long they found these rules insufficient and started making adjustments. Most students were left without racquets or balls and stood aimlessly on the sidelines watching their peers have all the fun. These bystanders started negotiating with the more active players, suggesting adaptations and introducing new rules, all in an attempt to find a way for more people to be involved.

身高超过六英尺的斯廷森站在场边,气场十足,但他除了提醒学生们前一天商定的规则外,几乎什么也没做。直到最后一节课的最后两分钟,他才开始发号施令,告诉学生们“好好想想这场比赛的意义,因为你们周五要交一篇论文”。但斯廷森知道,为了让学生们做好论文准备,他必须做得更多。如果放任不管,学生们很难将比赛的具体体验与关于宪法的抽象辩论联系起来。因此,第二天的课堂上,他安排了一次讨论,让学生们回顾这次比赛,并借此机会帮助他们理解,他们用球拍和球做出的妥协,与十八世纪美国建国先贤们做出的妥协之间的相似之处。

Standing over six feet tall, Stinson assumed a commanding presence on the sidelines, but he did little except remind students of the rules they had agreed upon the previous day. He became directive only in the last two minutes of the hour, when he told students to “think hard about what this game means because you'll have an essay due on Friday.” But Stinson knew that he had to do more than that to prepare students for this essay. Left to their own devices, students would have a hard time connecting the concrete experience of the game with an abstract debate over the Constitution. So, for class the following day he scheduled a discussion to debrief this experience, a time when he could help students see the parallels between the compromises they made with rackets and balls and those made by the nation's founders in the eighteenth century.

周三的课以简短的时事讨论开始,讨论的焦点是迅速发酵的伊朗门丑闻。斯廷森老师引导学生们注意贴在黑板上的一篇报纸文章:“民调显示里根支持率下降15个百分点”。“哟,他仍然是我的偶像!”唐尼说道,他身材高大,略显笨拙,头戴一顶黑色的麦克卡车帽。其他学生也纷纷加入,支持里根总统。许多比较活跃的学生戴着印有联合货运公司(Allied Van Lines)和联合货运公司(United Cargo)标志的帽子,这两家货运公司正是他们父母的雇主。还有一些学生穿着军装夹克,背后绣着苏比克湾和冲绳等地名。至少在这种氛围下,里根总统的声誉并未受到当天新闻的影响。

Class began on Wednesday with a brief discussion of current events, dominated by the fast-breaking Iran/Contra scandal. Stinson directed student's attention to a newspaper article taped to the board, “Poll Indicates Reagan's Approval Rating Down 15 Points” “Yo, he is still my main man” said Donnie, tall and ungainly and sporting a black Mack Truck cap. Other students joined in to support President Reagan. Many of the more vocal students were wearing caps with the logos of Allied Van Lines and United Cargo, the freight companies that employed their parents. Others wore military jackets with names like Subic Bay and Okinawa embroidered on the back. In this environment, at least, President Reagan's reputation was unscathed by the day's news.

当斯廷森走到教室中央时,学生们安静了下来。“周五要交的论文,我想让你们思考一下,你们设计的游戏和当今美国社会的人们之间有哪些相似之处。课前有几个同学说他们很难看出其中的联系。我希望通过讨论,我们能碰撞出一些新的思路。”斯廷森随后走到黑板前,将黑板分成两部分:“游戏”和“美国”。“好了,詹姆斯,”他开口问道,“你看出什么相似之处了吗?”詹姆斯身材瘦小,他把桌上的笔记本整齐地叠放在一起,看起来有些困惑。他犹豫了一下,说道:“嗯……我们不得不修改规则。”

Students quieted down as Stinson moved to the center of the class: “For your essay due on Friday, I want you to think about the parallels you see between the game you came up with and people living in American society today. A couple of people said before class that they were having trouble seeing connections. I hope that possibly, as we discuss this, we can get a few ideas going.” Stinson then went to the board and divided it into two sections: “The Game” and “U.S.A” “Okay, James” he began, “any parallels?” James, a slightly built boy who had arranged the notebooks on his desk into a symmetrical pile, seemed puzzled. Hesitating, he said, “Well,…we had to change the rules.”

“没错,”斯廷森大声说道。“我们改变了规则,尤其是在计分方式上。你能想到美国社会有哪些基本规则或法律吗?”“哪些条款被修改了?”詹姆斯一脸茫然,班上其他同学也一样。斯廷森对此并不感到意外。他知道学生们需要时间才能理解美国的法律体系是通过辩论和妥协建立起来的,而这种理解对于学生理解美国政府的形成至关重要。虽然有些学生可能已经察觉到游戏与美国立法程序之间的联系,但斯廷森希望这一点能够彻底明了。

“Exactly,” boomed Stinson. “We changed the rules, especially in how we scored. Can you think of any basic rules or laws in American society that have been changed?” James looked stumped, as did the rest of the class. This was no surprise to Stinson. He knew that it would take time for students to understand that America's system of laws was created through debate and compromise, an insight absolutely essential to student's understanding of the formation of American government. While some students may have sensed the connection between the game and American legislative processes, Stinson wanted it to be crystal clear.

“嗯,”他继续说道,“如果我们改变了游戏规则,那么与之对应的就是我们改变了在美国的生活方式,对吧?”这句话为学生们提供了所需的框架。艾伦立刻建议道:“是啊,就像大萧条时期以及所有那些社会福利项目一样。” 约翰补充道:“还有那些宪法修正案呢。”斯廷森催促他更具体一些。“比如禁止饮酒。” “没错,”斯廷森点点头。“很好!”

“Well” he continued, “if we have changed the rules of the game, then the parallel is that we've made alterations or changes in the way we live in America, no?” This prompt gave students the structure they needed. Immediately Ellen suggested, “Yeh, like the Depression and all those social programs,” John added, “And what about all those constitutional amendments.” Stinson pressed him to be more specific. “Like not being able to drink.” “Yes,” Stinson nodded. “Good!”

讨论开始变得热烈起来,斯廷森老师面带笑容,神采奕奕,一会儿在教室中央走动,一会儿又回到黑板前。妮可评论说游戏“一团糟”,斯廷森老师便借此机会解释说,他们即将学习的这段时期,从美国独立战争结束到宪法起草,被称为“关键时期”,这一时期充满了犹豫不决、行动迟缓和日益增长的不满——而这些恰恰是周二游戏的主题。斯泰西注意到并非每个人都参与了游戏,甚至没有参与制定规则,斯廷森老师便引导她将游戏与美国社会联系起来。 “嗯,在社会上,有些人投票,有些人不投票,但即使你不投票,你仍然要遵守那些规则。”很快,讨论就自然而然地展开了,这正是每位老师梦寐以求的。当一个学生回忆起游戏中的某个特点时,另一个学生就会想到美国社会中与之对应的例子。随着学生们在讨论中承担起更多责任,斯廷森老师也逐渐退居幕后。他认真听取了学生的意见,并默默地在黑板上填写了表格。

The discussion started to take off, and Stinson, now smiling and animated, darted from the center of the classroom to the side and back to the board. When Nicole commented that the game was “all confused,” Stinson used her response to explain how the period they were about to study, from the end of the Revolutionary War to the drafting of the Constitution, was known as the “Critical Period” a time marked by indecision, inaction, and growing discontent—the very qualities that characterized Tuesday's game. When Stacy observed that not everyone participated in playing the game, or even in making the rules, Stinson pushed her to make the connection to U.S. society. “Well, in society some people vote and some don't, but even if you don't vote you're still going to have to abide by those rules.” Before long the discussion was running by itself, every teacher's dream. When one student recalled a feature of the game, another generated its analogue in American society. As students assumed more responsibility for the discussion, Stinson receded into the background. He listened hard to student's comments and quietly filled in the chart on the blackboard.

一切的开端看似平常,谁也想不到这句简单的评论竟会引发如此轩然大波。唐尼的问题引发了一连串事件,对斯廷森管理课堂学术和道德氛围的能力提出了前所未有的挑战,这在他十七年的教学生涯中实属罕见。

It all began innocently enough, and no one could have predicted that this one comment would lead where it did. Donnie's question set off a chain of events that challenged Stinson's ability to manage the intellectual and moral climate of his classroom as few other challenges in his seventeen years of teaching had.

S先生,”唐尼开口说道,“您在游戏中一直关注着我们,就像政府一样,当我们制定规则时,您也有发言权。”

“Mr. S.” Donnie began, “you were watching over us in the game, kind of like the government or something, and when we made up a rule you had your little say in it too.”

“我只是设定了游戏规则,唐尼。那么,这又该如何类比呢?在美国,哪个机构或组织可以为我们设定规则呢?”

“I only set the parameters of the game, Donnie. What would be the parallel? What agency or institution in America sets the parameters on us?”

“你是说像最高法院那样的吗?”唐尼问道。

“You mean like the Supreme Court?” Donnie asked.

“那么,”斯廷森皱起眉头,“首席大法官会说他给我们设定了界限吗?”

“Well,” Stinson crunched up his forehead, “would the chief justice say that he puts parameters around us?”

唐尼似乎在效仿斯廷森的做法。“好吧,”唐尼停顿了一下,整理思绪,“假设你相当于最高法院或者宪法,然后还有人,比如校长,监督我们,做笔记。那算不算更高层次的政府形式呢?”

Donnie seemed to be following Stinson's lead. “Okay,” Donnie paused to gather his thoughts, “let's say that you were the equivalent of the Supreme Court or say the Constitution, and then there was somebody, like the principal, watching over us, taking notes. Would that be a higher form of government?”

斯廷森脸上写满了满意。他又一次抓住机会,让唐尼和班上其他同学更深入地思考:“当今世界,有哪个政府或法律力量能够告诉美国该怎么做吗?”

Stinson's satisfaction was written all over his face. Again he seized the opportunity to make Donnie and the rest of the class think harder: “Is there any government or legal force in the world today that can tell the U.S. what to do?”

一些学生回答说:“不可能!”另一些学生则对此嗤之以鼻。

Some students answered, “No way!” A few others laughed derisively at the thought.

“你们或许会笑,”斯廷森说着,从教室侧面走到前面,“但你们知道吗?作为联合国机构的国际法院认为,美国在尼加拉瓜的行动违反了国际法。我们通过在尼加拉瓜港口布雷和对尼加拉瓜采取公开的军事行动,被认定违反了国际法。但我想要提出的问题是:是否存在凌驾于宪法之上的权力?”

“You may laugh,” Stinson said, moving from the side of the class to the front, “but did you know that the World Court, which is an agency of the United Nations, has felt that the U.S. has operated in violation of international law in Nicaragua? By mining its harbors and taking overt military action against Nicaragua, we have been found in violation of international law. But the question I'm aiming at is this: Is there any authority that transcends the Constitution?”

学生们在课桌前坐立不安,但没有人说话。

Students fidgeted at their desks, but no one uttered a word.

“那么,”斯廷森继续说道,“道德权威或宗教权威呢?”

“Well,” Stinson continued, “What about moral authority or religious authority?”

仅仅提到宗教,就引来一阵“哦”和“啊”的惊叹声——这是学生们表示触及禁忌的信号。坐在前排的保罗似乎在重复着早已上演过无数次的剧本。“所以,S先生,您的意思是说有上帝吗?”

The mere mention of religion set off a flurry of “oohs” and “ahs” the student's signal that a taboo had been broached. Paul, sitting in the front row, seemed to initiate a script that had been played many times before. “So, Mr. S., are you saying there is a God?”

斯廷森犹豫了。“拜托,斯廷森先生。”学生们劝道,但斯廷森似乎在扮演一个早已烂熟于心的剧本中的角色,拒绝上钩。

Stinson hesitated. “Come on, Mr. S.” students chided, but Stinson, seeming to enact a part in a well-worn script, refused to take the bait.

“好的,唐尼,我问你一个问题:在纽伦堡审判中,受审的纳粹官员的辩护理由是什么?”

“Okay, let me ask you this, Donnie: What was the defense at Nuremberg of the Nazi officials in the dock?”

“服从上级命令,”辛迪插嘴道。

“Obeying a superior,” Cindy piped up.

“是的,辛迪,他们是在执行上级的命令,他们没有违抗的余地,因为他们被告知该做什么。这种辩护能让他们免于……”

“Yes, Cindy, they were following orders from their superiors, and they weren't in a position to disobey because they were being told what to do. Did that defense get them off the…”

斯廷森还没说​​完,克里斯就打断了他:“你知道吗,S先生,有32名纳粹分子被判无罪释放。”

Before Stinson could complete his sentence, Chris interrupted, “You know, Mr. S., thirty-two Nazis were acquitted.”

是的,斯廷森知道。他也知道克里斯肯定知道,因为克里斯、唐尼和戴夫这三个周三放学后“战争俱乐部”的成员几乎对二战的每一个细节都了如指掌,从中途岛战役的伤亡人数到德累斯顿轰炸的破坏程度,无所不知。但这句话并没有让斯廷森感到意外。

Yes, Stinson did know. He also knew that Chris would know, since Chris, Donnie, and Dave, the three members of the Wednesday after-school “War Club” knew practically every detail of World War II, from the number of casualties at Midway to the extent of damage in the firebombing of Dresden. But the comment left Stinson unfazed.

“这是否让赫尔曼·戈林脱罪?让阿尔伯特·施佩尔脱罪?更重要的是,这是否应该让他们脱罪?”

“Did it get Herman Goering off the hook? Albert Speer off the hook? More important, should it have gotten them off the hook?”

斯廷森的问题在课堂上引发了一阵小小的骚动,各种“是的”、“不可能”、“当然”的声音此起彼伏。学生们积极参与,热情高涨,他们不仅积极回应斯廷森的问题,还互相辩论。他继续深入探讨这个话题,因为他认为让学生们理解美国人一直以来都认为,有一种更强大的道德力量支撑着他们的法律体系,这一点至关重要。他希望通过一系列问题,引导学生们意识到他们早已有所直觉的想法。

Stinson's question ignited a minor explosion in the class, a cacophony of “yesses” “no ways” and “of courses.” Students were engaged and passionate, arguing with each other as much as responding to Stinson's query. He pressed on with this topic because it was important for students to understand that Americans have always assumed that a larger moral force buttressed their legal system. Through a series of questions, he hoped to get students to see what they had already intuited.

“假设有确凿的证据表明我参与了对无辜者的屠杀,”斯廷森继续说道,“我并不喜欢这样做,但我接到了命令。我问你,”他故意提高音量,故作高亢地说,“你会这么做吗?”

“Say there was incontrovertible evidence that I had been involved in the extermination of innocent people,” Stinson continued. “I didn't like it but I had been given orders to do it. Let me ask you,” he said, his voice rising to a mock crescendo, “would you do it?”

唐尼第一个回答道:“那么,S先生,我问您,如果您拒绝服从命令会怎么样?”

Donnie was the first to answer. “Well, let me ask you, Mr. S. What would happen if you refused orders?”

“我会受到惩罚,我会……”

“I would be punished, I would be…”

但他还没说完,蒂姆就插话道:“你很可能已经被枪毙并扔进坑里了!”

But before he could finish, Tim broke in: “You probably would have gotten shot and thrown in a pit!”

“那么,”斯廷森停顿了一下,他六英尺二英寸的身躯高高地俯视着蒂姆瘦弱的身材,“这是否意味着我这样做是正当的?”

“So.” Stinson paused, his six-foot-two-inch frame hovering above Tim's slight build, “does that mean I'm justified in doing it?”

课堂上再次爆发了一场混战,反对声和赞成声此起彼伏,指责和反驳的声音此起彼伏。在这一切喧嚣之上,克里斯低沉的声音响起:“告诉我,什么更重要:是个人生存,还是你根本不在乎的大众的生存?”

Again the class erupted into an free-for-all, with nos and yesses, charges and countercharges flying everywhere. Above it all, Chris's baritone voice made itself heard: “Tell me, what is more important: self-survival or survival of the masses you don't really care about anyway?”

“你告诉我,克里斯,”斯廷森直视着他,等着他的回答。气氛顿时变得紧张而沉默,但克里斯没有退缩:“我会保全自己。”

“You tell me, Chris,” Stinson replied, staring squarely at him, waiting for an answer. For a moment, the atmosphere turned tense and silent, but Chris did not back down: “I'd save my own skin.”

那一刻,斯廷森完全无暇顾及比赛、图表,甚至学生周五要交的作文。如果对这种态度不加纠正,就违背了他所有的教学理念。难道十年级的学生没有学过大屠杀吗?难道他们一点都没听进去吗?难道他们没有意识到自己所说的话的含义吗?

At that moment, the game, the chart, and even the essay students had to write for Friday were far from Stinson's mind. To leave such attitudes unchallenged would have violated everything Stinson believed about teaching. Didn't students have a unit on the Holocaust in tenth grade? Had it made no impression on them? Didn't they realize the implications of what they were saying?

所有人的目光都集中在斯廷森身上,这是他在课堂上第一次显得慌乱不已。

All eyes were on Stinson, who for the first time in the class period looked rattled.

“好吧,让我想想,”他说,“所以……克里斯,如果我理解没错的话,你的意思是说我有理由杀害无辜的人。接到命令就能让我免责吗?辛迪,你怎么看?”辛迪是班上最能言善辩的学生之一,但在这场讨论中却出奇地沉默,点名让她发言是经过深思熟虑的,他觉得她或许能扭转局面。“我认为这只能说明,”辛迪斩钉截铁地说,“你参与了你上级正在进行的非法活动。”

“Okay, let's see,” he said, “so…if I understand you, Chris, you're saying I'm justified in killing innocent people. Does having orders get me off the hook? What do you think, Cindy?” Cindy, one of the most articulate students in the class, had been oddly silent during this discussion, and calling on her was a calculated guess that she would help turn the tide. “I think that it just means,” Cindy stated forcefully, “that you are participating in the illegal acts your superiors are doing.”

谢天谢地,斯廷森心想,在这道德泥潭中总算有点理智可言。他希望这番话能让讨论重回正轨,让他能回到之前关于凌驾于人类法律之上的更高法则的观点。他只需要把这一点说清楚就行了。“那么,”他接着辛迪的话继续说道,“如果你要违抗上级政府的权威,那你究竟遵循的是哪条法则或原则呢?”他想,这个更有针对性的问题肯定能帮助学生们理解引发这一切的那个问题的真正含义。但今天显然没戏。黛比回答说:“你根本——你根本就没遵守任何原则或法则!”

Thank goodness, Stinson thought to himself, a small dose of reason in this moral quagmire. This comment, he hoped, would put the discussion back on track and help him get back to his point about a higher law that transcends laws enacted by human beings. All he had to do was make this point explicit. “So,” he said building on Cindy's comment, “if you are going to disobey the governmental structure above you, then what law or principles are you following?” Surely this more directed question would help students see the point behind the question that started all this. But that was not in the cards for today. Debby responded, “You're not—you're not obeying any principle or law!”

斯廷森的目光迅速瞥向时钟。离下课铃响还有十五分钟。他必须结束这场讨论,回去继续写周五要交的论文。可是,他怎么能对这些问题不予回应呢?还没等斯廷森喘口气,唐尼就再次回应了黛比的说法。

Stinson's eyes darted to the clock. Fifteen minutes left before the bell. He had to bring this discussion to a close, to return to the essays due on Friday. Yet how could he leave these issues out in the open, without an appropriate response? Again, before Stinson could catch his breath, Donnie responded to Debby's claim.

“没错,你是遵守原则。对纳粹来说,违抗命令就等于违抗宗教律法,因为党卫军真的相信——至少他们中的很多人相信——希特勒是上帝赐予他们的领袖,他们的救世主。还有一点。二战时期,我们的人也在杀他们的人;他们也在杀我们的人,仅仅因为他们奉命行事,而且他们的规模更大,这和我们的人所做的事情并无本质区别。难道不是一回事吗?他们奉命行事,否则就会被送上军事法庭。”

“Yes, you are. You are obeying a principle. In the case of the Nazis, to disobey orders would also be disobeying religious laws, since the SS really believed—a lot of them did at least—that Hitler was their God-given leader, their messiah. And one more thing. Back in the Second World War, our men were killing their men; they were killing ours, just because those guys were told to do it, and they were doing it on a bigger scale, that's no worse than what our men did. Isn't it the same thing? They were told to do it or they'd be court-martialed.”

斯廷森一脸难以置信。“你是把打仗的士兵和屠杀无辜民众的卫兵相提并论吗?”

Stinson looked incredulous. “Are you equating a soldier fighting in war with a guard exterminating innocent people?”

“嗯,这仍然是士兵之间的对决。”克里斯的话引来一阵热烈的掌声。学生们的兴奋,或者至少是克里斯、唐尼和戴夫脸上的兴奋,与斯廷森苍白的脸色形成了鲜明的对比。

“Well, it's still soldier versus soldier.” Chris's comment evoked a round of raucous applause. The student's excitement, or at least the excitement on the faces of Chris, Donnie, and Dave, clashed with Stinson's ashen expression.

“即使一个人在四年内屠杀了四万人,”克里斯继续说道,“如果他没有这么做,他也会受到军事法庭的审判;如果我们的人没有枪杀他们的人,或者擅离职守什么的,他也会受到军事法庭的审判。”

“Even if a guy wipes out forty thousand people over a four-year period,” Chris continued, “and if he didn't do it he would have gotten court-martialed, and if one of our guys didn't shoot one of their guys or went AWOL or whatever, he would have gotten court-martialed.”

“所以你的意思是,克里斯,”斯廷森问道,“一名党卫军卫兵屠杀民众的行为是正当的,因为他只是在做二战时期其他人都在做的事情——服从命令?”

“So what you're saying, Chris,” asked Stinson, “is that an SS guard who exterminates people is justified because he was doing what everybody else in the Second World War was doing? Following orders?”

克里斯似乎有所退让,或者至少重新调整了思路。“好吧,我们来谈谈越南战争。二战的时候,至少你面对的是一支军队。但越南战争就不一样了。敌人无处不在,藏在灌木丛里,到处都是敌人。”

Chris seemed to back down, or at least to regroup. “Well, let's talk about Vietnam. In World War II, at least, you were fighting an army. But in Vietnam, hey, it was different. The enemy was all over, hiding in bushes, the enemy was everywhere.”

越南。至少这个词终于被提到了。在整个讨论过程中,斯廷森的思绪一直萦绕在美莱村,尤其是脑海中挥之不去的一个画面:一个不超过五岁的小男孩面朝下躺在被杀害的父亲身旁。斯廷森也知道,克里斯和唐尼也对越南战争念念不忘,他们的父亲都在越南战场上负伤。他犹豫了一下,但最终决定沿用之前想到的一个例子。这很冒险,但他需要某种方法来唤醒这些孩子,让他们从道德的麻木中挣脱出来。

Vietnam. At least the word had finally been uttered. Throughout this discussion, Stinson's mind had raced to My Lai, particularly to an image fixed in his mind of a little boy, not more than five years old, lying face down next to his murdered father. Stinson also knew that Vietnam was very much on the minds of Chris and Donnie, both of whom had fathers wounded in Vietnam. He hesitated momentarily but decided to pursue an example that had occurred to him earlier. It was risky, but he needed some way to jar these kids out of their moral complacency.

“好。假设你所在的班组在越南,你们来到一个村庄,这个村庄一直给你们带来很多麻烦,狙击手很多,班长的少尉很生气。”斯廷森的话又引发了一连串的“哦”和“啊”的惊叹声。但几分钟以来,房间里第一次安静了下来。

“Okay. Let's say that you're with a squad in Vietnam, and you guys come into a village and this village has been giving you guys a lot of problems, a lot of sniping, and the lieutenant in charge of the squad is pissed off.” Stinson's language set off another flurry of “oohs” and “ahs” But for the first time in minutes, the room fell silent.

“于是他命令你们,”斯廷森继续说道,“把所有村民都带出来,村里有妇女、儿童和老人;很多年纪稍大的男孩和男人都不在。他对你们说,‘嘿,我受够了这个该死的村子,我们现在就把它解决掉。把他们都抓起来,枪毙了,我们要把他们全部消灭;他们以后再也别想给我们添麻烦了。’”斯廷森停顿了一下。他沉着冷静地转过身,面对着他的学生们。仿佛是直接对他们每个人说的那样,他问道:“你们会这么做吗?”

“And so he orders you,” Stinson continued, “to bring out all the villagers, and there are women, children, and old men; a lot of the older boys and men are not there, and he says to you, ‘Hey I'm sick and tired of this damn village, we're going to take care of it right now. Round them up and shoot them, we are just going to wipe them out; they are not going to give us any problems any more.’”Stinson paused. Deliberately, methodically, he turned to face his students. As if speaking directly to every one of them, he asked, “Would you do it?”

没人说话。有些人焦躁不安地扭动着身子,把纸片折成小三角形,或者用铅笔敲着桌子。也许他终于要成功了。他决定更进一步。

No one said a word. Some fidgeted nervously, folding pieces of paper into tiny triangles or tapping their pencils on their desk. Maybe he was finally getting through. He decided to take it one step further.

他面无表情地怒视着克里斯、唐尼和戴夫。“我现在就告诉你们,”他提高了音量,“把他们带出去,毙了他们。你们会怎么做?”他追问道,“你们会说‘是’还是‘否’?”

Without breaking role, he glared at Chris, Donnie, and Dave. “I'm telling you right now” his voice amplified, “take 'em out and shoot 'em. What would you do?” he pressed. “Would you say yes or no?”

男孩们都避开了斯廷森的目光。开口说话的是辛迪——辛迪,就是之前唯一一个代表道德的声音。“听着,”她开口说道,语气既同情又歉意,“当你承诺做某件事的时候,你肯定会做一些你不喜欢的事情。”

The boys averted their eyes from Stinson's. It was Cindy who spoke—Cindy, who had been the lone voice of morality earlier in the hour. “Listen” she began, her voice sympathetic and apologetic. “When you make a commitment to do something, you're going to do things you don't like.”

一直沉默不语的亚历克斯突然大声嘟囔道:“你怎么知道你喜欢它?”

Alex, who had said nothing during the period, muttered loud enough for all to hear, “How do you know you don't like it?”

斯廷森脑子一片混乱。亚历克斯的虚张声势,一个十六岁少年想要震惊同龄人的渴望,他能理解。但辛迪呢?如果她都这么想,其他人又会怎么想?下课还有五分钟,斯廷森颓然地瘫坐在课桌前的椅子上。沉默了许久,他才神情凝重地转向全班同学。

Stinson's head was spinning. Alex's bravado, the desire of a sixteen-year-old boy-man to shock his peers, he could understand. But Cindy? If she felt this way, what did the others think? There were five minutes left in the period when Stinson slumped down in a chair in front of his desk. After what seemed an interminable pause, he faced the class somberly.

“我尽量不把个人情感带入这件事。但我听到的这些真的让我很不安。这起事件发生在1968年的美莱村,开枪的威廉·卡利和他的指挥官梅迪纳上尉被送上了军事法庭,不是因为他们没有开枪,而是因为他们开了枪。军方自己也认为这是丧尽天良的行为。你为什么这么认为?”斯廷森问道,他的问题与其说是疑问,不如说是指责。“军方自己也说过,这不是美国人会做的事;即使当时下达了命令,这种行为也太过分了,简直是反人类。”

“I will try not to inject my own personal feelings into this. But I am really disturbed by what I'm hearing here. This incident occurred in 1968 at My Lai, and the person involved, William Calley, the person who pulled the trigger, and his commanding officer, Captain Medina, were court-martialed, not for not doing it, but for doing it. The army itself found this to be an unconscionable action. Why do you think so?” Stinson asked, his question as much accusation as query. “The army itself said that this is not what Americans do; even though an order was given, this was beyond the pale, a violation against humanity.”

斯廷森的时机把握得恰到好处。时钟开始嗡嗡作响,就像铃声即将响起前那样。还剩一分钟,这句话似乎要为这场艰难的讨论画上句号。但唐尼不肯罢休。他颤抖的声音里夹杂着激情和愤怒。

Stinson's timing was impeccable. The clock began to hum as it did right before the bell was about to ring. There was a minute left to go, and this comment seemed to bring closure to this difficult discussion. But Donnie wouldn't have it. His quivering voice conveyed a mixture of passion and anger.

S先生,这就像美国独立战争;一个农民拿起枪开枪,然后又回到田里,情况也一样。在越南,你永远无法分辨谁是你的朋友,你根本不知道——你的哥们儿可能就是个越共士兵,你就是不知道。”

“Mr. S., it's like the Revolutionary War; a farmer picks up a gun and shoots and then goes back to the field, same thing. People in Vietnam, you could never tell who your friend was, you didn't know—your buddy could be a Viet Cong soldier, you just didn't know.”

唐尼发自肺腑地讲述了他父亲的经历,他父亲在岘港附近触雷失去了左腿。

Donnie spoke from his heart, drawing on the experience of his dad, who lost his left leg to a land mine near Da Nang.

斯廷森虽然同情唐尼,但无法容忍他那番话的含义。“那你打算怎么办,唐尼?你是说我们必须先开枪,然后再问问题吗?”

Stinson felt for Donnie but could not tolerate the implications of his comment. “So what do you do, Donnie? Are you saying that we must shoot first and ask questions later?”

“没错,”戴夫为朋友辩护道,“你永远不知道谁对谁错;他们朝我们开枪;人们经常做出错误的判断。”

“That's right,” said Dave, coming to his friend's defense. “You never knew who was right; they shot at us; people make a lot of bad judgments.”

克里斯也附和道:“你必须采取这样的行动。因为赢得这种战争的唯一方法就是消灭所有人。”

Chris joined in. “You have to take actions like that. Because the only way you win a war like that is to exterminate the whole population.”

斯廷森显然很慌乱。他坐在办公桌前,用两只肌肉发达的手臂托着头。“有些事情真的令人不安……”克里斯,你刚才说的话暗示着,唯一的获胜方法就是消灭所有人。我问你,”斯廷森深深地叹了口气,“那算什么胜利?”

Stinson was visibly flustered. He sat at his desk, cradling his head between his two muscular arms. “There are some really disturbing implications in what you just said, Chris. That the only way to win is to wipe out everybody. I ask you,” Stinson sighed deeply, “what kind of victory would that be?”

克里斯毫不犹豫地回答道:“彻底的胜利!”

Chris responded without flinching, “A complete victory!”

学生们喧闹而紧张的笑声几乎盖过了下课铃声。

Students' laughter, raucous and nervous, almost drowned out the bell signaling the end of the period.

余波

THE AFTERMATH

我们很容易对斯廷森在课堂上仓促做出的教学决定妄加评判,但我们不应忽视他的历史课与那些被媒体丑化、被学术文献诟病的历史课之间的显著差异。斯廷森在许多人失败的地方取得了成功。他的课堂充满活力,成为一个历史问题与文化记忆交融的熔炉。对斯廷森的学生来说,“学校知识”和来自日常生活的经验并非泾渭分明的范畴,至少在历史方面是如此。正是因为斯廷森成功营造了一种氛围,在这种氛围中,教育并非“学术式”的,而是一个辩论、讨论和质疑的过程,这些青少年才得以从“玩过家家”转变为真正地表达自己的观点和自我。

It is easy to second-guess the pedagogical decisions Stinson made in the heat of the moment, but we should not lose sight of the striking difference between his history class and those that have been caricatured by the media and bemoaned in the scholarly literature. Stinson has succeeded where many fail. His classroom seethes with energy, becoming a crucible where issues of history mix with issues of cultural memory. For Stinson's students, “school knowledge” and knowledge from their everyday experience are not separate categories, at least as far as the past is concerned. It is because Stinson has succeeded in creating an atmosphere where education is not “academic” but instead is a process of debate, discussion, and questioning that these adolescents go from “playing school” to putting their own views and selves on the line.

无论是在教室、新闻编辑室,还是在城市的街头,只要过去与现在在记忆争议的问题上交汇,就可能引发一场失控的冲突。在这五十分钟里,教室变成了战场,学生和家长与教师和课程展开较量,争夺历史的最终归属。这里的“课程”不仅指斯廷森教授的美国官方历史课程,也指他课堂上那些虽不公开但却根深蒂固的“隐性课程”——他认为历史应该是一种人文体验,让学生的思维更加细致入微,同时培养他们对简单答案的厌恶。虽然从未以如此程式化的语言明确表达,但这个目标激励着斯廷森所做的一切。正是这个目标,让斯廷森面临着他最大的挑战:如何引导一群青少年思考社会生活的阴暗面,以及《理想国》第二卷中提出的“强权不代表正义”的理念。

Whether in the classroom, the newsroom, or the streets of the inner city, whenever the past meets the present over issues of contested memory, the ingredients are present for a conflagration that can rage out of control. During these fifty minutes the classroom becomes a battleground, pitting student and parent against teacher and curriculum in a contest over how the past will be remembered. “Curriculum” here refers not just to the mandated U.S. history curriculum Stinson teaches but also to the largely tacit but deeply felt “hidden curriculum” of his classroom—his belief that history should be a humanizing experience that makes student's thinking more nuanced, while cultivating in them a distaste for easy answers. Though never enunciated in such formulaic terms, this goal motivated all that Stinson did. It was with this goal that Stinson faced his greatest challenge: how to move a group of adolescents to consider the dark side of social life, the notion that goes back to the second book of the Republic that might does not make right.

随着讨论逐渐失控,混淆了战斗人员和平民之间的区别,将第二次世界大战盟军的军事行动与别动队在波兰前线屠杀犹太人的事件混为一谈,斯廷森与时间赛跑,时间是我们称之为学校的地方里无处不在的智力评判标准。虽然历史课和隔壁的几何或化学课一样都是五十分钟的课时,但两者之间存在着深刻的差异。虽然关于解二元一次方程或阿伏伽德数基础的讨论可能会促使老师们对学习和教学法进行深刻的思考,但这些讨论很少会引发关于“何为人”、关于“如何面对远超自我的力量”的思考。此外,几何或化学老师不必应对那些不断向年轻人灌输图像和叙事的文化力量,这些图像和叙事往往旨在麻痹而非培养思考。尤其当历史课堂涉足“鲜活的历史”领域,即那些仍然活跃在社会记忆中并由亲历者铭记的事件时,历史教师只是众多声音中的一个,而且在MTV、电影、唱片骑师、父母、邻居、同龄人和其他人的嘈杂市场中,他的声音往往微弱。

As this discussion careened out of control, knocking down distinctions between combatants and civilians, Allied military campaigns of World War II and the Einsatzgruppen's murder of Jews on the Polish front, Stinson raced against the clock, that ubiquitous arbiter of intellectual life in the place we call school. Though sharing the fifty-minute format with the geometry or chemistry classroom down the hall, the history classroom differs in profound ways. While discussions on solving equations with two unknowns or the foundations of Avogado's number may provoke teachers to ask themselves deep questions about learning and pedagogy, they rarely raise questions about what it means to be human, what it means to answer to powers that dwarf the self. Moreover, the geometry or chemistry teacher does not have to contend with cultural forces that feed young people a steady diet of images and narratives that often seek to anesthetize rather than cultivate thought. Particularly when the history classroom ventures into the terrain of “lived history” events still active in social memory and kept alive by those who experienced them, the history teacher is just one voice, and often a muted voice, in a cacophonous marketplace of MTV, movies, disc jockeys, parents, neighbors, peers, and others.

再加上青少年文化的氛围,尤其是十六七岁男孩们荷尔蒙爆棚的虚张声势,我们就能理解斯廷森和其他像他一样的人所面临的挑战。唐尼和克里斯的鲁莽或许可以归因于“男孩本性”的哗众取宠,以及里根政府时期军国主义的复兴。与此同时,我们很难不从他们的言辞中,从他们对最残酷暴力的轻描淡写中,听到当代暴力,特别是发生在校园内的暴力的回响。

Add to this cauldron the ethos of adolescent culture, particularly the testosterone-fueled bravado of sixteen-and seventeen-year-old boy-men and one starts to see the challenges faced by Stinson and others like him. We might attribute some of Donnie's and Chris' brashness to a “boys-will-be-boys” desire to shock, as well as to the resurgence of militarism that characterized the Reagan administration. At the same time, it is hard to listen to their words, their wave-of-the-hand dismissals of the rawest of violence and not hear echoes of contemporary violence, particularly violence that has occurred within school walls.

在思考斯廷森在这样的讨论之后会怎么做时,人们往往会倾向于寻找一个正确的行动方案,仿佛存在某种公式可以教导年轻人如何从过去中汲取意义,并以一种体面的方式生活。我在此并不认同这种策略。相反,我想通过进一步拓展本章的框架来结束它——我建议读者设身处地地站在斯廷森的角度思考,第二天的课堂可能会是什么样子。基于此,我提出以下三种情景。

In thinking about what Stinson might do after a discussion like this, there is a tendency to seek a right course of action, as if some formula existed for teaching young people how to make meaning from the past and live their lives with a sense of decency. It is a strategy I reject here. Instead, I want to bring this chapter to a close by opening it up further—by suggesting that the reader put herself or himself in Stinson's shoes and ask what the next day's class might look like. In this spirit I offer the following three scenarios.

情景A:一位虔诚的信徒

Scenario A: A Man of Faith

当被问及自己的宗教信仰时,斯廷森含糊其辞。事实上,他是一位牧师的儿子,也是一位虔诚的基督徒,在决定从事教育工作之前,他曾积极参与基督教青年运动。当天晚些时候,在反思这堂课时,斯廷森不禁思考:他思考着,如果不提及上帝,是否还能就道德问题展开严肃的讨论。在脑海中反复回想了这场讨论后,他回到教室,以比以往任何时候都更加直接的方式分享了自己对讨论问题的看法。下一节课开始时,他直视着唐尼的眼睛说道:

When questioned about his own religious beliefs, Stinson hedged. He is in actuality the son of a minister and a devout Christian who was involved in Christian youth movements prior to his decision to enter teaching. In reflecting on this class later in the day, Stinson wondered whether one can have a serious discussion about morality without invoking God. After replaying the discussion in his mind, he returned to the classroom and shared, in a more direct way than ever before, his own view on the issues of the discussion. At the beginning of next class he looked Donnie squarely in the eyes and said:

唐尼,你说杀害无辜的妇女儿童或许是一场“彻底的胜利”。也许在你看来是这样,但我必须坦诚地告诉你,这种想法令我深感不安。对我而言,这种行为是罪恶的极致,最终必将受到上帝的审判。对不起,唐尼,我再也无法控制自己了。你看,我相信在审判日,我们都要为自己的行为负责。在那一天,评判我们的不是是否服从了士官的命令,而是是否服从了神的旨意。我相信,最终,我们要向上帝负责,而不是向世人负责。信不信由你,这正是我们今年要学习的宪法背后的驱动力。教师不得利用公立学校的讲台宣扬某种宗教信仰,但我们也不能假装我们的行为、社会责任以及我们为人处世的方式不受信仰的影响。在这种情况下,我不仅是你的老师,也是你的同胞。正因如此,我必须谈谈你在课堂上所说的话的含义。

Donnie, you said that killing innocent women and children may be a “complete victory.” Perhaps in your eyes, but I have to be honest with you. The thought disturbs me greatly. For me, such an action is the epitome of sin and must ultimately be judged in the eyes of God. I'm sorry, Donnie, but I can no longer restrain myself. You see, I believe that we will be held accountable for our actions on a day of judgment. On that day, we will not be evaluated by whether we obeyed the will of our staff sergeant but whether we obeyed the will of the Divine. In the final result, I believe, we answer to God, not man. And believe it or not, this principle was a motivating force behind the Constitution that we will study this year. Teachers are not allowed to use the podium of the public school to promote a particular religious belief, but neither can we pretend that our actions, our social commitments, and the way we navigate the world are unaffected by our beliefs. In this case, I am not only your teacher but a fellow human being. And it is in that capacity that I must address the implications of what you said in class.

方案二:历史课模拟镇民大会

Scenario B: History Class as Town Meeting

斯廷森仔细思考了刚才发生的事情,但他始终无法理解唐尼的反应。究竟是什么让他产生了这样的想法?他决定给唐尼的父亲打电话,和他谈谈孩子在课堂上的表现。在通话中,斯廷森决定邀请唐尼的父亲来他的历史课上,讲述他在越南的经历。第二天早上,学生们走进第二节美国历史课的教室,发现唐尼的父亲正坐在斯廷森预留的位置上。这位老兵以这样一个问题开始了演讲:

Stinson thought hard about what had transpired, but he could not fathom Donnie's response. What could motivate such beliefs? He decided to call Donnie's father and talk to him about the boy's behavior in class. During this phone call, Stinson decided to ask the father to come and speak to his history class about his experiences in Vietnam. The next morning students entered the second-period U.S. history class to find Donnie's dad sitting in the place reserved for Stinson. This vet began his talk with this question:

我为什么在越南失去了一条腿?我来告诉你:因为我们被“朋友”出卖了。我们被告知要打仗,但却被束缚了一只手。我告诉你,不管你的历史书怎么说,如果我们被允许用我们熟悉的方式去打仗,我们本来可以赢得那场战争。越南战争中有平民丧生吗?当然有。你给我找出人类历史上哪场战争没有平民伤亡?抱歉,这就是战争。如果我们没有做好应对平民伤亡的准备,我们一开始就不应该卷入这场战争。既然我们已经卷入了战争,我们就犯了一个错误,那就是用那种方式束缚了我们的士兵。我们许多最优秀、最聪明的人才被装进裹尸袋带回了家,就因为华盛顿某些只会纸上谈兵的官僚自以为是。很多和你同龄的孩子身边都带着残疾的父亲,因为那些所谓的美国人支持敌人,在我们冒着生命危险的时候焚烧美国国旗。

Why did I lose my leg in Vietnam? I'll tell you why: Because we were double-crossed by our “friends.” We were told to fight a war but to fight it with one hand tied behind our backs. I'll tell you this, no matter what your history books tell you, we could have won that war if we had been allowed to fight it the way we knew how. Did civilians get killed in Vietnam? Of course they did. You show me one war in the history of mankind where civilians did not get killed. I'm sorry, but that's war. If we weren't prepared for that to happen, we should have never got into it in the first place. Once we did, we made a mistake by handcuffing our troops the way we did. A lot of our best and brightest came home in body bags because some paper pusher in D.C. thought he knew what was right. A lot of kids your age are walking around with crippled dads because so-called Americans supported the enemy and burned the American flag while we risked our lives.

方案C:美莱

Scenario C: My Lai

当斯廷森思考着学生们的言论——比如“因为奉命行事,所以杀害儿童是正当的”这种说法——时,他脑海中突然闪过他读过的第一篇关于美莱村大屠杀的文章。下课后,他翻阅文件找到了那篇文章。生活》杂志的文章《美莱村大屠杀》刊登了目击者的证词和照片,记录了美军士兵在越南村庄杀害妇女和儿童的场景。他计划明天让学生在课堂上阅读这篇文章,周四讨论卡利的审判,周五让学生就卡利的辩护和军事法庭的判决写一篇作文。“关键时期”和《邦联条例》固然重要,但还有更紧迫的问题需要处理,而且学生们现在也兴致很高。“关键时期”的内容只能暂时搁置了。

As Stinson thought about things his students said—the notion that killing children is justified because you were ordered to do it—his mind flashed to the first article he had read about the My Lai massacre. After class he went to his files to retrieve it. The Life magazine article, “The Massacre at My Lai” featured eyewitness accounts and photographs of the American soldiers killing women and children in that Vietnamese village.4 He would have students read the article in class tomorrow, talk about Calley's trial on Thursday, and have students write an essay on Calley's plea and the verdict of the military court for Friday. The “Critical Period” and the Articles of Confederation were important, but there were more pressing issues that had to be dealt with now, while student's interest was high. The “Critical Period” would have to wait.

结论

CONCLUSION

随着社会问题持续困扰着社会,历史在课程中的地位依然岌岌可危。在“环境教育”、“服务教育”、“和平教育”以及其他诸多教育形式的呼声中,历史总是被要求证明自身的价值。近来,美国校园暴力事件的增加,也促使人们更加呼吁开设“品格教育”课程,旨在向美国青少年灌输正确的价值观。

As society continues to be wracked by social problems, the place of history in the curriculum remains precarious. History is always being called on to justify itself amidst calls to teach “environmental education” “service education” “peace education” and a host of other competitors. Of late the rising violence in American schools has increased calls for “character education” courses and curricula designed to instill values among American youth.

许多此类尝试都被批评为保守派试图麻痹城市贫民区的愤怒情绪,并稀释本已有所淡化的课程。但斯廷森的课堂向我们表明,当人们以勇气和最深刻的视角看待历史时,无需新的课程就能探讨永恒的价值问题。在像他这样的课堂上,历史无法回避品格问题。像斯廷森这样的老师允许青少年打破“玩过家家”的模式,真正地投入到学习中。这样的课堂讨论必然会演变成自由社会中常见的充满争议的判断、冲突和紧张问题。这正是杜威所说的,学校不是民主的训练场,而是民主实践的场所。要么课堂成为我们学习彼此交流的场所,要么我们将承受从未学会如何交流的深远后果。

Many of these attempts have been criticized as conservative attempts to lobotomize inner-city rage and dilute an already watered-down curriculum. But Stinson's classroom shows us that when history is approached courageously and at its deepest levels, no new curriculum is needed to engage enduring questions of values. In classrooms like his, history cannot avoid issues of character. Teachers like Stinson allow adolescents to break out of the mode of playing school and put themselves on the line. Discussions in such classrooms will inevitably boil over into the contentious issues of judgment, conflict, and tension that characterize a free society. This is what Dewey meant when he wrote that schools are not training grounds for democracy but the places where democracy is enacted. Either the classroom becomes a site where we learn to talk to one another, or we will suffer the enduring consequences of never having learned to do so.

笔记

NOTES

本案例研究基于斯坦福大学教师评估项目(由李·舒尔曼指导,卡内基纽约基金会资助)一位参与者在历史课上的真实讨论。我编辑了讨论中的一些引文,但尽力保留了其原意。本案例研究的写作灵感来源于与阿拉斯加大学费尔班克斯分校的朱迪·克莱因菲尔德的对话;它最初发表于她编辑的“跨文化教育教学案例”系列丛书(由阿拉斯加大学出版社出版,费尔班克斯,1993年)。本书对其进行了大幅修订和更新。

 

This case study is based on an actual discussion in the history class of a participant in the Teacher Assessment Project at Stanford University, which was directed by Lee S. Shulman, and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. I have edited some quotations from the discussion but have made every effort to retain the original meaning. The writing of this case study was stimulated by conversations with Judy Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks; it originally appeared in a series she edited, “Teaching Cases in Cross-Cultural Education” published by the University of Alaska Press (Fairbanks, 1993). It has been substantially revised and updated for this volume.

 

1.关于历史教学的实证研究鲜少挑战这种观点,尤其是在探讨“典型”或普通的教学模式时。历史教学效果不佳的原因有很多。一些解释侧重于教师被迫完成规定的课程,而忽略了学生最关心的内容:参见罗伊·罗森茨威格和戴维·西伦合著的历史的存在》 (纽约,1998)。另一些解释则侧重于教师学科知识准备不足:参见黛安·拉维奇在彼得·斯特恩斯、彼得·塞克斯和萨姆·温伯格主编的《认识、教授和学习历史:国家和国际视角》(纽约,2000)中发表的《历史教师的教育》。本章以及第七章所述的研究,都明确地寻找“非典型”和非代表性的课堂。

1. Empirical evidence on history teaching does little to challenge this image, particularly when addressing “typical” or garden-variety instruction. There are many explanations for lackluster history instruction. Some focus on teachers who feel compelled to cover a mandated curriculum at the expense of the content that most concerns students: See Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past (New York, 1998). Other explanations focus on teacher's inadequate subject matter preparation: See Diane Ravitch, “The Education of History Teachers” in Peter Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York, 2000). The research described in this chapter, as well as that described in Chapter 7, explicitly sought out the “nontypical” and nonrepresentative classroom.

2.此名称及所有其他名称均为化名

2. This name and all others are pseudonyms.

3. Reba N. Page,《低年级课堂》纽约,1991 年)。

3. Reba N. Page, Lower-track Classrooms (New York, 1991).

4.生活》(1969 年 12 月 5 日),第 36-45 页。

4. Life (December 5, 1969), 36–45.

10

10

在新千年里理解(历史)意义

Making (Historical) Sense in the New Millennium

在一次关于越南战争的采访接近尾声时,弗雷德·刘易斯表达了对十六岁女儿安妮塔对这场战争知之甚少的担忧。采访即将结束时,弗雷德开始思考该如何向安妮塔讲述这段历史。

Near the end of an interview about the Vietnam War, Fred Lewis expressed concern about how little his sixteen-year-old daughter, Anita, knew about the war. As the interview came to a close, Fred speculated about how he might teach Anita about this period.

弗雷德·刘易斯对女儿无知的反应,充分体现了我们在新千年如何看待历史,以及普通人在现代社会如何看待历史知识的传承。他没有建议带女儿去图书馆,也没有建议和她一起查阅百科全书,更没有提到微软百科全书(Encarta ™)或互联网。尽管弗雷德曾与一位越战老兵共事,但他从未提出安排见面的可能性。相反,他制定了以下计划来教女儿了解越南:

Fred Lewis's response to his daughter's ignorance speaks volumes about how we become historical in the new millennium, about how ordinary people think about the transmission of historical knowledge in the modern age. He does not suggest taking his daughter to the library. Nor sitting down with her and looking up Vietnam in an encyclopedia. No mention of Encarta or the Internet. Although Fred worked with a Vietnam vet, he never suggested the possibility of arranging a meeting. Instead, he formulated the following plan for teaching his daughter about Vietnam:

我在想,或许我们可以——我们得找一部《绿色贝雷帽》的拷贝,你知道,就是约翰·韦恩演的那部,或者类似的电影,这样她就能更了解当时发生的事情了。我不知道这主意是否准确,但至少能引发一些问题。

I was thinking maybe we could—we'll have to get a copy of The Green Berets, you know, with John Wayne or something like that, so she's a little bit more aware of what was going on. I don't know how accurate all that is, but at least it would bring up some questions.

弗雷德·刘易斯面临着许多父母都熟悉的困境。对于上一代人来说,很难接受自己的孩子对几年前发生的事情一无所知。和许多父母一样,弗雷德希望女儿能“多了解一些”她出生前发生的事情。为了培养这种意识,他像任何一位优秀的老师一样,采取了相应的措施。他会考虑课程设置。事实上,鉴于他自身的政治和意识形态倾向,弗雷德很清楚该寻找哪些资料以及去哪里寻找。他没有去附近的图书馆,而是去了附近的百视达(Blockbuster)门店。

Fred Lewis faced a dilemma familiar to many parents. It is hard for one generation to get used to the idea that their own children have no sense of what happened a few short years ago. Like many parents, Fred wants his daughter to be “a little bit more aware” of what went on before her birth. To create this awareness, he responds as any good teacher would: He thinks about curriculum. In fact, given his own political and ideological leanings, Fred has a clear idea of what materials to look for and where to find them. It's not to his neighborhood library that he turns, but to his neighborhood Blockbuster.

回顾过去

THINKING ABOUT THE PAST

1996年,我获得了斯宾塞基金会的资助,开始进行一项纵向研究,探讨像弗雷德和安妮塔这样的普通人如何将自己的人生视为历史的一部分。我重点关注了十五位青少年及其父母的生活。这些年轻人就读于西雅图地区的三所高中。其中一所是位于市中心的复杂校区,采用分班教学和差异化教学,班级规模大,学生们说着二十三种不同的母语。第二所学校则截然相反:这所私立预科学校的学费每年超过一万美元,班级人数只有十到十二人,学生们会围坐在一位拥有博士学位的历史老师身边,讨论当天的作业。第三所学校,也就是安妮塔·刘易斯就读的那所,致力于“拓展神的国度”,帮助学生理解并运用“圣经原则”,以“取悦神”的方式进行学习。这所学校的学生大多是白人中产阶级,来自不同的基督教教派。

In 1996, with a grant from the Spencer Foundation, I embarked on a longitudinal study of how ordinary people like Fred and Anita conceptualize their lives as historical beings. I focused on the lives of fifteen adolescents and their parents. The young people attended three high schools in the Seattle area. One was a meandering inner-city complex, with a tracked and differentiated curriculum, large classes, and students who spoke twenty-three different native languages. A second school was at the opposite end of the spectrum: With tuition set at over $10,000 per year, this private preparatory academy had classes of ten to twelve students who would sit around a table with their history teacher, who held a Ph.D., to discuss the day's assignment. The third school, the one Anita Lewis attended, was dedicated to “furthering God's Kingdom” by helping students understand and apply “principles of scripture” in a way “which pleases God.” Students attending this school were mostly white and middle-class, from a range of Christian denominations.

在三所学校中,我分别选取了五名学生,作为研究对象。当时,他们正准备开始州政府规定的十一年级美国历史课程。我想了解这些年轻人在进入十一年级之前,也就是他们在高中阶段最后一次正式接触美国历史之前,是如何看待自己作为历史人物的。我想知道在这一年中,学习美国历史的经历对他们意味着什么,以及一年后,当他们高中毕业、准备迎接未来时,他们是如何记住所学内容的。整整一年,我和我的研究生团队在这三所学校投入了无数个小时,旁听历史课,录制讲座,与十五名学生保持联系,同时收集、整理和归档他们的作业、试卷、课堂笔记和学期论文。

In each of the three schools, I selected five students as they embarked on their state-mandated eleventh-grade U.S. history course. I wanted to understand how these young people thought of themselves as historical beings prior to starting eleventh grade, their last formal exposure to U.S. history in high school. I wanted to know what the experience of learning U.S. history meant to them during the year, and how they remembered the content of instruction a year later, as they completed high school and prepared for the future. For a year, I, along with my team of graduate students,1 spent countless hours in these three schools, watching history classes, audiotaping lectures, touching base with our fifteen participants, all the while collecting, cataloguing, and sorting their assignments, tests, class notes, and term papers.

我们的兴趣远不止于课堂。我们想了解这十五位青少年如何理解自己过去,包括他们家庭和社区的历史。这意味着我们要在他们家中,通常是在他们的客厅里,对他们进行访谈,并请他们讲述自己的出生故事(对他们而言,这是一件意义非凡的事情)。(他们完全是从别人那里听说的),并讲述他们生活中最重要的事件。在此基础上,我们请他们“绘制”一张地图,描绘国家历史上最重要的事件,以此了解不同背景的青少年如何从自身视角理解历史。这次初步访谈有时长达三个小时,是两年半时间里进行的八次正式访谈之一。

Our interests went beyond the classroom. We wanted to understand how these fifteen teenagers understood their own pasts, including the histories of their families and communities. This meant interviewing them in the context of their homes, typically in their living rooms, and asking them to tell us the stories of their own births (an event that they had heard about entirely from others), and to narrate the most important events in their lives. From here, we asked them to “draw a map”2 of the most important events in the life of the nation, offering a look at how a diverse cross-section of adolescents conceptualized history from their own perspective. This initial interview, which in some cases ran as long as three hours, was one of eight formal interviews over the course of two and a half years.3

这些学生都成长于家庭之中,我们也希望捕捉到他们成长经历的这一方面。教育文献中充斥着关于“家庭即教育者”的说法,但这一短语的含义却远非清晰明了。为了更好地理解学生形成历史自我的语境,我们对学生的父母进行了与学生相同的详尽的人生历程访谈,并在研究过程中对父母进行了两次额外的访谈或问卷调查。最后,三位教师也分别参与了同样的人生历程访谈,以及与学生访谈类似的其他访谈。

Each of these students grew up in a family, and we wanted to capture this aspect of their experience as well. The educational literature is filled with claims about the “family as educator” but the meaning of this phrase is anything but clear. To better understand student's contexts for developing a historical self, we subjected parents to the same grueling life history interviews that students engaged in, and over the course of the study we interviewed or surveyed parents twice more.4 Finally, each of the three teachers participated in the same life history interview, along with several other interviews along the lines of those completed by students.

越南访谈

THE VIETNAM INTERVIEW

我们开展了近150次正式访谈,对象包括学生、家长和教师;进行了130小时的课堂直接观察;并分析了2000多页书面文件。这些研究成果难以尽述,仅能概括其大致内容。为简洁起见,我在此重点介绍两年数据收集过程中最丰富、也最令人难忘的一项活动:我们与家长共同进行的关于越南战争和20世纪60年代意义的访谈。

It is impossible to do more than convey a sense of the findings that have emerged from our nearly 150 formal interviews with students, parents, and teachers; 130 hours of direct classroom observation; and our analyses of over 2,000 pages of written documents. In the spirit of economy, I focus here on the richest and certainly the most memorable data-gathering activity across the two years of data collection: our joint parent-child interview about the Vietnam War and the meaning of the 1960s.

在研究越南战争时,我们想探讨一个父母亲身经历过,但对他们的孩子来说却已成为“历史”的历史事件——也就是所谓的“亲身经历的记忆”和“后天习得的记忆”之间的区别。在研究这个问题时,我们面临诸多困境。我们最不想做的就是营造一种考试的氛围;我们主要目标是让一代人就一个具有重要历史意义的议题展开对话。为了减轻压力,创造一个相对自然的氛围,我们决定采用图片和歌曲作为研究工具。

In studying Vietnam, we wanted to examine a historical event that was experienced by parents in their own lifetimes but had already become “history” for their children—the difference, if you will, between lived memory and learned memory. We were faced with many dilemmas in examining this issue. The last thing we wanted to do was create a setting that seemed like a test; our primary goal was to get one generation to talk to the other about an issue of historical significance. To reduce the pressure and create a somewhat natural setting, we decided to focus on pictures and song.5

我们的采访围绕六张标志性照片和一首两分钟的歌曲展开。这些照片包括《生活》杂志刊登的九岁女孩潘氏金福在凝固汽油弹袭击后赤身裸体奔跑的照片;一张含义模糊的照片,照片中一名美国大兵腋下夹着两个越南儿童,似乎正在逃离战场;1970年5月,在曼哈顿市政厅前举行的支持战争集会上,建筑工人的身影;1967年10月,在五角大楼游行期间,一位嬉皮士将一朵雏菊插进一名国民警卫队员的枪管里;一位越南老兵手持粉笔,在越南战争纪念碑上描绘着一位阵亡战友的名字;还有一幅1968年的漫画,画中死神站在墓碑前,问山姆大叔:“我该把死因写成什么?”我们播放的歌曲是琼尼·米切尔创作、克罗斯比、斯蒂尔斯、纳什和杨演唱的《伍德斯托克》。(“他们是谁?”几乎一半的青少年都疑惑地问道。)采访采用自由回答的形式:家长和孩子们各自写下对图片和歌曲的感受,彼此互不透露,然后在讨论中与我们分享这些感受。我们确保孩子们先对每张图片进行发言,这样他们的回答就不会受到父母的影响。

We built our interview around a series of six iconic pictures and a two-minute presentation of a song. The pictures included the Life magazine picture of a nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked after a napalm bomb attack; an ambiguous picture in which a GI, holding two Vietnamese children under his arm, appears to be fleeing a battlefield; construction workers at a pro-war rally in front of Manhattan's City Hall in May 1970; a flower child placing a daisy into the gun barrel of a National Guardsman during the March on the Pentagon in October 1967; a Vietnam vet, chalk in hand, tracing the name of a fallen comrade at the Vietnam War Memorial; and a cartoon from 1968 in which the Angel of Death, standing against a background of tombstones, asks Uncle Sam: “What should I put down as the reason for dying?” The song we played was “Woodstock” written by Joni Mitchell and performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. (“Who are they?” wondered nearly half of the teens.) The interview took the form of free-response: Parents and children wrote down their reactions to the pictures and song without revealing them to each other, and then shared these responses with us in discussion. We made sure that children spoke first about each picture so that their responses would not be biased by those of their parents.

经过最初几次采访,我们意识到自己偶然发现了一种比想象中更有力的采访形式。纸巾也成了采访室的必备物品。对许多父母来说,越南战争过去是、现在仍然是他们生活的一部分,而且这种影响强烈到几乎无需任何刺激就会爆发。他们对这次采访的回应,如同一个缩影,展现了当代政治光谱的缩影:从那些将越南战争视为美国衰落开端的人——这场战争将美国推入了如今充斥着犯罪、性丑闻和无法无天的深渊——到一位母亲满怀惆怅地转向她十六岁的孩子,叹息道:“现在不像现在这样,人人都只顾自己。那时候我们还有目标。

After the first few interviews, it became clear that we had stumbled upon a format more powerful than we had imagined. Tissues joined the list of required supplies in the interview room. For many parents, Vietnam inhabited and continues to inhabit their present, and does so with an intensity that spills over with little provocation. Their responses to this interview captured the contemporary political spectrum in microcosm, from those people who mark Vietnam as the beginning of the fall, the event that launched America into its current abyss of crime, sex, and lawlessness, to the mother who wistfully turned to her sixteen-year-old and sighed, “It's not like now, where everybody is out for himself. Back then we had a purpose.

对德莱尼一家——16岁的约翰、他的母亲凯伦和父亲肯——的采访,体现了这种方法在阐明促使我们开展这项工作的更宏大的历史意识问题方面的潜力。德莱尼一家是白人,属于中产阶级,虔诚的基督徒。约翰就读于前文提到的那所基督教高中。他聪明外向,积极参与学校戏剧社,表达清晰流畅,并且能够很好地阐述自己的信仰。在他那22人的历史课上,他总是最积极发言的学生之一。德莱尼一家住在西雅图郊区一栋现代化的两层楼房里,那里风景如画,街道安静,草坪修剪整齐,孩子们在人行道上骑着自行车。

The interview with the Delaney family—sixteen-year-old John, his mother, Karen, and his father, Ken—represents the potential of this approach to shed light on the larger questions of historical consciousness that motivated our work. The Delaneys are white, middle-class, and devoutly Christian. John attends the Christian high school described earlier. He is an intelligent, outgoing student, active in the school drama society, articulate in his responses, and well-spoken about his beliefs. In his history class of twenty-two students, he was consistently among the most vocal participants. The Delaneys live in a modern two-story house in a picturesque suburb of Seattle, with quiet cul-de-sacs, well-tended lawns, and children riding their bikes on the sidewalks.

肯和凯伦都四十多岁了。两人高中时期正值征兵制的最后几年,而且他们都没有兄弟姐妹或近亲参加过越南战争。但这并没有减弱他们两人的情感。父母的证件也摆在那里。和我们样本中的许多受访者一样,德莱尼夫妇并不把越南战争的经历视为一段遥远的、与他们的生活擦肩而过的往事,而是将其视为一个核心时刻,至今仍在塑造着他们的现在。事实上,他们强烈的情感与十六岁的约翰形成了鲜明的对比。在《生活》杂志上看到那张获得普利策奖的金福照片时,凯伦泣不成声,转向约翰(约翰并不认识这张照片),向他解释了照片的由来。肯的声音也颤抖着,接过凯伦的话,用一种模糊了过去与现在的语气问道:“我们到底在做什么?我们为什么要这样做?谁又能从这场武力展示中获利?他们在那里对抗的军队看起来并不强大。”

Ken and Karen are in their mid-forties. Both were in high school during the last years of the draft, and neither had siblings or close relatives who served in Vietnam. But this fact did not dull the emotion both mother and father displayed. Like many respondents in our sample, the Delaneys regarded the Vietnam experience not as a distant event that had brushed against their lives, but as a core moment that continues to shape their present. Indeed, the intensity of their emotion provided a point of contrast with sixteen-year-old John. On viewing the Pulitzer-prize winning picture of Kim Phuc in Life, Karen, sobbing, turned to John (who did not recognize the picture) and explained its origin. Ken, his voice shaking as well, picked up her sentence, using language that blurred past and present: “What are we accomplishing, why are we doing this? And who's profiting by all this show of force? That doesn't look like a very substantial army they're fighting there.”

父母沉默了一会儿,平复了情绪。我转向约翰,问他是否有什么想问父母的,或者有什么让他好奇的事情。约翰的回答触及了情感在理解历史中的作用。由于他远离越南,约翰声称自己比父母都“更客观”,因此能够提供更准确的历史叙述。

After a silence during which the parents regained their composure, I turned to John and asked if there was anything he wanted to ask his parents, anything that aroused his curiosity. John's answer touched on the role of emotion in understanding history. Because of his distance from Vietnam, John claimed that he was “more objective” than either parent and, consequently, could offer a better historical account.

约翰:我觉得我的观点更客观,因为我没有亲身经历过,我不认识去越南打仗却没回来的人……我没有亲身经历过,我从来不需要审视我们的政府,然后问自己:“他们为什么要去那里?”我觉得我比(我的父母)更能客观地看待这件事……

 

John: I think I have more of an objective view because I didn't live through it, I don't know people who went to Vietnam and didn't come back, or anything…I didn't live through it, I never had to look at our government and go, “Why are they in there?” I can look back more than, I think, than [my parents] can….

 

面试官:你认为你对这件事情感投入较少,这对你理解事情的来龙去脉是有帮助还是有阻碍?

 

Interviewer: Do you think the fact that you] have less emotion with it helps or hinders you in understanding what went on?

 

约翰:[减少情绪]确实有帮助,但我觉得如果我面对的是经历过类似事情的人,[减少情绪]就完全没用了。我觉得这会让我情绪低落,因为如果我和一个经历过类似事情的人交谈,而我突然对发生的事情感到难过,我就很难感同身受,我会——我可能没什么反应。但我觉得,从逻辑严谨的角度来看——我不是什么学者什么的——但我想,如果用一种类似瓦肯人的逻辑思维方式来回应[笑]——我可以这样说:“嗯,事情是这样的,这些事发生了,还有这些事,这就是……”——我想我或许能更客观地权衡利弊。

 

John: [Having less emotion] helps, but I think if I was dealing with some one who'd gone through it [having less emotion] wouldn't [help] at all. I think it would dampen me because I wouldn't be able to relate as much if I was talking to someone who'd gone through it and all of a sudden was just kind of feeling sad about what went on, I would be like—I wouldn't have much response for them. But I think in a logical scholarly way—I'm not a scholar or anything—but I guess in a logical Vulcan kind of response [laughs]—I can go, “Well, this is what happened, these things happened and these things happened and this is the”—I think I can probably weigh the pros and the cons more objectively.

 

因此,以下是一位聪颖的十六岁美国文化参与者对历史理解的粗略认识论。在约翰看来,情感会威胁历史的客观性,然而,如果他要“与”经历过战争创伤的人打交道,情感恰恰是能够帮助他的要素。然而,这种被约翰视为同理心基础的情感,却始终游离于合法的认知范畴之外。历史理解。在约翰看来,历史理解的最佳诠释莫过于《星际迷航》中的瓦肯人斯波克先生,他最显著的特征(除了尖耳朵之外)就是缺乏情感。

Here, then, is a rough epistemology of historical understanding, according to a bright sixteen-year-old participant in American culture. For John, emotion threatens historical objectivity, yet it is the very ingredient that would help him were he to “deal with someone” who had experienced the trauma of war. However, this emotion, which John viewed as the foundation for empathy, remained outside the purview of legitimate historical understanding. For John, historical understanding is best captured by Mr. Spock, the Vulcan character from Star Trek, whose most striking characteristic (besides his pointed ears) was the inability to feel.

约翰的观点需要认真对待,因为在我们的参与者中,他的观点并非个例,而且其中肯定包含着一丝真理。不受约束的激情会对历史理解构成威胁,尤其当情感的力量导致历史学家歪曲或压制数据,或者在面对相反证据时仍然固执己见时。然而,很难想象在严肃的历史研究中,情感能够完全不发挥作用——即便不是体现在历史学家对研究对象的热情上(正是这种热情促使学者们花费无数时间在昏暗简陋的档案馆中埋头苦读),至少也体现在历史学家对他们试图理解的人物的共情能力上。约翰是一位认真聪颖的高二学生,他想象中的历史研究是由一群冷漠无情、脱离人性的“机器”完成的。这种认识论的根源在于一个自相矛盾的隐含逻辑:历史学家在与研究对象没有个人联系时最为客观;然而,恰恰是这种个人联系激发了兴趣和激情。奇怪的是,在约翰看来,最适合从事历史研究的人,反而是最没有动力去做这件事的人。

John's views need to be taken seriously, for they were not unique among our participants, and surely they contain a grain of truth. Unbridled passion poses a threat to historical understanding, especially when the forces of emotion cause the historian to skew or suppress data or to hold on to cherished beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary. Yet it is hard to imagine serious historical work in which emotion plays no role—if not in the historian's passion for the subject (which allows scholars to spend endless hours slogging through documents, often in dark and poorly heated archives), then at least in historian's ability to empathize with the people they seek to understand. John, a serious and intelligent high school junior, has an image of historical scholarship carried out by emotionless drones alienated from their human origins. At the base of this epistemology is a contradictory implicit logic: Historians are most objective when they are not personally connected to their subject; however, it is precisely one's personal connection that generates interest and passion. Oddly, for John, those best suited to carry out historical work are those least motivated to do it.

约翰的反应与我们在启示录高中观察到的教学情况一致。在那里,他的历史老师带领全班学生按部就班地学习美国历史课程。他的课堂充斥着大量的琐碎历史事实,每周还有客观题测试,为大学先修课程(AP)考试做准备。我们注意到,教室里贴满了圣经海报(其中最大的海报上用工整的字体写着:“耶稣会怎么做?”),而教学内容却泛泛而谈,不拘泥于任何地点或时间,两者之间存在着巨大的鸿沟。如果说有什么因素塑造了这套历史课程,那并非是马可福音和马太福音,而是新泽西州教育考试服务中心(ETS)的政策决定。6

John's response is consistent with the instruction we observed at Revelations High School, where his history teacher marched the class in a straight line through the U.S. history curriculum. His class was characterized by heavy doses of minute historical facts, and weekly objective tests in preparation for the Advanced Placement exam. We noted a wide chasm between the Biblical posters lining the room (on the largest, neatly printed letters read: “What would Jesus have done?”) and the generic “anywhere any time” quality of instruction. If one factor gave shape to this history curriculum, it was not the testaments of Mark and Matthew but the policy decisions of the Educational Testing Service in New Jersey.6

鉴于我们在约翰的课堂上观察到的情况,我们很容易将他的观点与他所接触的历史类型联系起来。两者之间当然存在联系,但我们认为这种联系远不止于一位老师一丝不苟地讲授课程。事实上,约翰关于何为优秀历史的观点,在很大程度上与他的父母不谋而合。对约翰的父亲来说,历史就是“分析”,他甚至担心自己在访谈中流露出的情感可能会给我们的研究带来不必要的“偏见”。在这方面,父子俩的想法不谋而合。

In light of what we observed in John's classroom it is tempting to connect his views to the kind of history to which he had been exposed. There is surely a connection, but we believe it goes far beyond the influence of a single teacher plowing determinedly through the curriculum. Indeed, John's views about what makes good history were shared, for the most part, by his parents. History, for John's dad, was about “analysis” and he even expressed concern that the emotion he displayed in our interview might introduce unwanted “bias” into our study. In this regard, father and son were of like mind.

我们认为,这里体现的是一些关于日常历史判断标准和历史学家日常工作的强有力且相对稳定的理念。在某种程度上,德莱尼夫妇的观点反映了历史学进入现代研究型大学后不久的流行观念,但到了20世纪30年代,美国历史学会的两位主席卡尔·贝克尔和查尔斯·比尔德已经开始质疑这些观点。同样值得注意的是,这些观点与当代历史学家对其工作的看法之间存在着巨大的鸿沟。甚至可以说,在后现代时代,那些摒弃情感的历史著作本身就值得怀疑,因为它们被视为一种通过修辞手段掩盖其论点潜在论战本质的工具。尽管历史学界推崇主观性和立场性——后现代性的两大核心美德——但客观性及其可实现性的观念在德莱尼家族中依然存在。

At work here, we believe, are powerful and relatively stable ideas about everyday criteria for sound historical judgment and the day-to-day work of the historian. To some extent, the Delaneys' views reflect notions prevalent soon after history's arrival in the modern research university, but by the 1930s such views were already being questioned by two presidents of the American Historical Association, Carl Becker and Charles Beard. Also notable is the chasm between these ideas and those expressed by contemporary historians about their work. One might even claim that in our postmodern age, historical works that abjure emotion are themselves suspect, viewed as devices that mask, through rhetorical means, the underlying polemical nature of their arguments. As the profession celebrates subjectivity and positionality, two cardinal virtues of postmodernity, notions of objectivity and its attainability live on in the Delaney household.

约翰或许觉得自己比父母更客观、更少受情绪影响地看待越南战争,但在采访过程中,他却时常表现出强烈而清晰的反应,并试图通过引用一些几乎不带任何感情色彩或客观性的资料来佐证自己的观点。例如,约翰对一张美国大兵抱着两个小孩离开战场的照片的反应。这张照片本身就含义模糊,受访者对此有不同的解读。有些人认为照片中的大兵是绑架者;而另一些人(包括约翰和他的父母)则认为他是救人者。事实上,正是约翰将照片中的人物解读为在战争的恐怖中拯救生命的士兵,才导致了他接下来的反应:

John may feel that he is more objective and less emotional about Vietnam than his parents, but at points in the interview he displayed clear and strong reactions and looked to bolster his claims by appealing to sources that were hardly dispassionate or objective. An example was John's response to the picture of the GI leaving a battle scene with a young child tucked under each arm. The picture is itself ambiguous and was variously interpreted by our respondents. Some viewed the GI as a kidnapper; others (including John and his parents) viewed him as a rescuer. Indeed, it was John's interpretation of the subject as a soldier saving lives in the midst of the horrors of war that led to the following response:

瞧,这个人正在跑,也许他当时并不是在跑,但看起来像是在往外跑,胳膊下抱着两个孩子。讽刺的是,我们一想到越南,总会听到有人说“哦,杀婴犯”。而这个人却抱着两个孩子跑了出来,仿佛他是在把孩子从身后的灾难中拯救出来。我觉得这张照片拍得很好。

Here's this guy running, and maybe that's not what he was doing, but it looks like he's running out and he's got these two kids under his arms, kind of ironic that we think of Vietnam, you always hear someone say, “Oh, baby killers.” So here's this guy running out, and he's got these two kids, it's like he's saving them from the disaster that's going on behind him. I thought it was a well-taken photo.

约翰的语言值得关注。首先,在我们所有的访谈中,很少有青少年如此清晰地描述过去如何影响现在。约翰说,他听到“杀婴犯”这个称呼,而且不是一两次,而是“总是”听到,这个称呼针对的是越战老兵。那么,约翰究竟是从哪里听到的呢?根据我们观察和记录,在他的课堂上,除了美国历史课上那一次60分钟的讨论之外,越战几乎从未被提及。他的父母也不太可能说出这样的话。至少可以说,关于“被唾弃”的老兵形象的历史依据十分薄弱,而且肯定没有充分文献支持,足以支撑约翰在三十年后依然如此清晰的日常记忆。7事实上,正如埃里克·迪恩在《惊魂未定:创伤后应激障碍、越南战争与内战》一书中写道,第一批从越南撤出的美军士兵在西雅图市中心约翰家的后院受到了人群的欢迎,人群高呼“谢谢,谢谢”。“旗帜飘扬,彩带如雨般落下,漂亮的姑娘们将红玫瑰塞进士兵们的手中。” 8

John's language merits attention. First, it was a rare moment in our interviews when an adolescent so clearly reported an instance of the past intruding into the present. John reports that he hears the epithet “baby killer” aimed at Vietnam vets not once or twice but “always.” Where, then, might John hear this? From our observations and documentation in his classroom, we know that Vietnam figured hardly at all there, beyond a single sixty-minute discussion in this U.S. history course. Nor was this the type of thing that either his mother or his father would likely say. The historical basis for the image of the “spat-upon” veteran is weak, to say the least, and certainly not documented to a point that would warrant, some thirty years later, the strength of John's everyday recollection.7 In fact, as Eric Dean notes in Shook Over Hell: Post-traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War, the first American troops withdrawn from Vietnam were greeted in John's backyard, downtown Seattle, by a crowd that cheered, “Thank you, thank you” “Flags waved, ticker tape showered down on the troopers, and pretty girls pressed red roses into the men's hands.”8

那么,约翰究竟是从哪里听到这些贬义词的呢?或者更广泛地说,哪些信息来源帮助约翰理解越南战争?在这次访谈中,约翰提到了几个信息来源。其中一个是他完成的一份关于理查德·尼克松的报告,他在报告中试图证明“尼克松是一位好总统,因为他在外交事务方面取得了成就”。为了撰写这份报告,约翰阅读了一些传记和自传,但他没有记下任何书名。(我们当时也没有想到要追问他。)事实上,在访谈中,约翰唯一一次为某个历史论断提供具体出处,是在他谈到“战争对经济有利”时。

 

Where, then, might John hear such epithets? Or, more generally, what sources of information contribute to John's understanding of Vietnam? In the course of this interview, John mentioned several. One was a report he completed on Richard Nixon, in which he set out to prove that “Nixon was a good president based on his accomplishments in foreign affairs.” In researching this report, John read “some biographies and autobiographies” but he did not note the names of any. (Nor did we have the presence of mind to probe him.) Indeed, the only point in the interview where John provided a specific reference for a historical claim came in response to his statement that “war was good for the economy.”

 

采访者:好的,请您帮我更好地理解一下。有人可能会说,这场战争代价非常高昂。我们消耗了大量的军火,损失了飞机,失去了年轻人,而且运送部队的成本也很高。那么,根据您的理解,利润是如何从中产生的呢?

Interviewer: Okay, so help me get a little bit better understanding for a second. One person might say that the war was a very costly effort. We are expending all of these armaments and we're losing our planes and we're losing young people and it's the sheer cost of transporting [troops] there, so, how does, from your understanding, how does profit enter into it?

约翰:哦,因为纵观历史,战争总能促进经济发展。就像《辛德勒的名单》里那样——辛德勒说,我尝试过各种生意,但都失败了,因为我什么都没有。是什么改变了他的命运?战争。这是因为战争会增加对金属制品的需求,因为你会损失飞机、装备、直升机、坦克等等,你需要制造这些东西,而你必须让美国本土有人来制造这些东西。

 

John: Oh, because you—any point in history you look at, war builds up an economy. It's like in Schindler's List—Schindler said, I tried all these businesses and they never worked because I never had one thing. What changed his luck? War. And it's, because with war there's a higher demand for metal works because you're losing your planes and your equipment and your helicopters and tanks and what not, you need to make those, and you have to have someone back in the U.S. to make those things.

 

当被要求详细阐述关于战争益处的论断时,约翰既没有引用学校里学到的知识,也没有运用任何经济学方面的专业知识。他引用的论据来自史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格的电影《辛德勒的名单》,这部电影并非改编自历史事件,而是改编自托马斯·基尼利的历史小说。约翰关于战争与利润之间关系的论断或许有一定依据,但这显然无关紧要。重要的是他引用的具体内容,这与他之前关于尼克松报告的模糊表述——“参考了一些书籍和自传”——形成了鲜明的对比。这一次,他的语言直截了当,没有任何引言、限定或前言,比如“就像我在电影《辛德勒的名单》里看到的那样”。约翰的论证基于一个假设:他和采访者拥有相同的文化背景(就此而言,这个假设是正确的!)。他能够运用速记的方式,从这种共享知识中汲取灵感。在阐述他对战争的论断时,约翰援引了历史,但他记忆中的过去是电影式的,一个模糊了事实与虚构的过去,最终,在约翰的推理中,这为他的历史论断提供了依据。

Asked to elaborate on a claim about the benefits of war, John turned neither to something learned in school nor to formal knowledge about economics. His proof text came from Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, a movie based not on a piece of history but on a piece of historical fiction by Thomas Keneally. John's claim about the relationship between war and profit may have some basis, but this is surely beside the point. Important here is the specificity of his reference, compared with his earlier vague statements about “some books and autobiographies” consulted for his report on Nixon. His language in this instance is direct and comes with no introduction, qualification, or preface such as, “It's like, I saw in the movie, Schindler's List” John works on the assumption that he and the interviewer share cultural knowledge (in this case, a correct assumption!), and that he can draw on a facet of this shared knowledge using shorthand. In making his claim about war, John calls upon the past, but it is a filmic past that he remembers, a past that blurs fact and fiction, and that ultimately, in John's reasoning, provides warrant for a historical claim.

这并非个例,无论是在约翰的访谈中,还是在我们其他的访谈中,都出现过这种情况。事实上,另一部电影对约翰的理解起到了更大的作用——这部电影将真实的历史影像融入到虚构事件的视觉叙事中。《阿甘正传》曾经是,而且显然现在仍然是,德莱尼一家人聚在一起讨论过去的契机。9家人拥有这部电影的拷贝,并且反复观看。约翰说:“我们谈论越南战争,我想,《阿甘正传》总是会引发家人的讨论。你知道,他们总是提到金钱和贪婪,我理解他们的感受。”这部电影也成为了德莱尼一家与亲密好友——例如越战老兵唐·韦弗利——的会面点。约翰说:“唐不谈论越南战争。他几乎不提……唐和我们一起看过一次《阿甘正传》,在越战场景出现时,他非常安静。”

This was not an isolated instance, either in John's interview or in our other interviews. Indeed, another movie played an even greater role in John's understanding—in this case, a movie that integrated actual historical footage into the visual flow of fictional events. Forrest Gump served, and apparently continues to serve, as an occasion for the Delaney family to sit together and discuss the past.9 The family owns a copy of the film and has watched it together repeatedly. John: “We talk about Vietnam and I guess the family, Forrest Gump always brings up something along those lines. You know, they always mention the money and the greed and I understand where they're coming from.” The movie also served as a meeting point between the Delaneys and close family friends—for example, Don Waverly, a Vietnam vet. John: “Don doesn't talk about Vietnam. Doesn't really say anything about it…. Don watched [Forrest Gump] with us once, and he was real quiet during the Vietnam scenes.”

在德莱尼一家讨论六十年代时, 《阿甘正传》成了他们的起点。与我们样本中的其他家庭不同,他们没有前往越南战争纪念碑朝圣,德莱尼一家的参考资料是一盘录像带。约翰唯一逐字引用的关于越南战争的具体信息来源,既不是来自父母、老师、牧师,也不是他读过的任何书籍;而是《阿甘正传》中的一段对话

 

Forrest Gump served as the starting point in the Delaneys' discussions of the sixties. Unlike other families in our sample, who made a pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Delaneys' point of reference was a videocassette. The only specific source of information about Vietnam that John quoted verbatim came not from parents, teachers, ministers, or any of the books he had read; it was a snippet of dialogue from Forrest Gump.

 

面试官:你在面试开始时提到了《阿甘正传》 。

Interviewer: You mentioned Forrest Gump in the beginning of the interview.

约翰:好电影。

John: Good movie.

面试官:你提到它是指什么?

Interviewer: And you mentioned it in reference to what?

约翰:哦,那部电影其实主要围绕六十年代展开。它讲述的是婴儿潮一代的故事,从1950年代到1980年代。那是他们的生活。我觉得我父母对这部电影的感受和我完全不同。我有些朋友说这是他们看过的最无聊的电影之一。但我不同意这种说法,我觉得它真的很好。它有很多值得探讨的地方,我们可以从中学习到很多东西——比如态度。但是你看《越南战争》,有个嬉皮士看着穿着军装的阿甘,问他:“谁是杀婴凶手?”

 

John: Oh, that movie really just centers around the sixties. It's a story of the baby boomer generation, from 1950 something to 1980 something. It's their life. My parents I think related to it in a totally different way than I did. I have friends who say it was one of the most boring movies they've ever seen. Now I disagree with that statement, I thought it was a really good movie. That it had a lot to say, could learn a lot from it—attitudes. But you watch Vietnam and the guy says to Forrest Gump, one of the hippies looks at Forrest Gump in his military uniform, and he goes, “Who's the baby killer?”

 

正是这样一个场景:一个长相酷似学生争取民主社会组织(SDS)成员的人嘲讽身穿制服的冈普,称他为“杀婴犯”,约翰声称自己在日常生活中“总是听到”这种说法。这段影像成为约翰对整个越南战争时期最清晰、最深刻的记忆。

It was this very scenario, in which an SDS look-alike taunts the uniformed Gump by calling him a “baby killer” that John claimed to “always hear” in his daily life. This celluloid image was the clearest and sharpest recollection John had of the entire Vietnam era.

人们很容易将约翰的评论解读为当代电影如何影响我们对过去的理解的又一例证,而这种现象已成为文化研究学者们热衷的研究课题。 10显然,约翰受到了电影的影响——确切地说,是几部电影。但这种观察仅仅触及了表面。一部电影,或者更确切地说,是一部家庭录像带,已经成为德莱尼一家重温过去的契机。他们聚集在客厅里,从架子上取下一盘录像带,然后放进录像机。与前往历史遗址朝圣或参观历史博物馆不同,我们家庭娱乐中心的录像带体现了美国人对便利性的追求。虽然我们可能“出门”去电影院观看过去,但在录像时代,过去变成了我们拥有的东西。录像带中可用的过去,首先意味着它永远触手可及

It is tempting to characterize John's comments here as just another instance of how contemporary film influences our understanding of the past, a phenomenon that has become a cottage industry for scholars in cultural studies.10 Obviously, John is influenced by a film—several films, to be exact. But that observation only scratches the surface. A film, or in this case a home video, has become an occasion for the Delaney family to revisit the past. They convene in their living room, take a cassette from their shelves, and insert it into a VCR. Unlike a pilgrimage to a historical site or a trip to a history museum, the videos in our home entertainment centers speak to the American imperative of convenience. While we may “go out” to the movies to see the past, in the video age the past becomes something we possess. The usable past on video is, above all, the always available past.

就像我们的其他物品一样,录像带在需要时随时可用。仅在这次采访中,就三次提到把观看《阿甘正传》作为家庭活动,其中一次是德莱尼一家和他们的朋友、越战老兵唐·韦弗利一起观看的。我们甚至可以想象,德莱尼一家在其他时间也看过这部录像带。通过反复观看,录像带扮演的角色与早期人们珍视的文字和神圣的经文颇为相似。录像中的对话片段提供了便捷的转喻——它们的出现唤起了大量的情感、价值观和联想。由于人类的大脑对细节的记忆远胜于对细节来源的记忆,细节得以保留,而其来源却逐渐消失。因此,约翰说他总是听到“杀婴者”这个词,这没错,但他很可能最常听到的是编剧罗伯特·泽米吉斯笔下的一个角色说的。换句话说,虚构的过去,而非真实的历史事件,成为了约翰对当下的参照框架。

Like our other possessions, the videocassette is available to us when the need arises. In this interview alone there were three specific references to watching Forrest Gump as a family activity, including one time when the Delaneys watched with their friend, the Vietnam vet Don Waverly. We can even imagine that the Delaneys watched the tape at other times as well. Through this repeated viewing, the video comes to function in a role not unlike that of cherished writings and sacred texts in earlier times. Snippets of video dialogue offer convenient metonymies—their invocation calls up a flood of feelings, values, and associations. Because the human mind remembers detail far better than its provenance, the detail remains but its source falls away.11 So John is correct when he says that he always hears “baby killers” but it's likely that he hears it most often from a character whose lines were written by the screenwriter Robert Zemeckis. In other words, the fictionalized past, not the historical event, becomes John's frame of reference for the present.

德莱尼一家观看录像的习惯赋予了“家庭作为教育者”这一概念新的内涵。诚然,这个家庭仍然在进行教育,但并非以诺曼·洛克威尔式的程式化方式。故事不再是在厨房的餐桌上代代相传,而是在客厅的沙发上,录像机开始播放之后。家庭成为了这段影像历史课的背景;家庭承载着好莱坞提供的宏大文化叙事。在传统社会中,家庭会前往纪念场所——战场、圣徒圣地或其他纪念地点——而在这里,借用皮埃尔·诺拉的话来说, “记忆之地”本身并非一个地点,而是一件物品。录像带消除了朝圣的必要性,并符合了……现代性。它使人们无需朝圣即可进行仪式,只需轻触按钮即可回到过去。

The Delaneys's viewing habits give a new twist to the notion of the family as educator. The family still educates, to be sure, but not in some stylized Norman Rockwell way. It's not the kitchen table where stories are transmitted from generation to generation, but the living room couch, once the VCR starts to play. The family serves as the context for this video history lesson; the family mediates the larger cultural narrative that Hollywood provides. Whereas in traditional societies the family would travel to sites of memory—battlefields, shrines of saints, or other commemorative locales—here the “lieux de mémoire” to invoke Pierre Nora, is not a site per se but an object.12 The videocassette obviates the need for pilgrimage and conforms to the imperatives of modernity. It permits ritual without pilgrimage by putting the past at the touch of a button.

集体记忆与集体遮蔽

COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND COLLECTIVE OCCLUSION

对德莱尼一家的访谈结果让我们得以一窥我们研究方法的成效。德莱尼一家是十五个受访家庭之一。在本节中,我将概述所有受访家长和青少年的总体趋势。

The findings from the Delaney interview provide a glimpse of what our approach has elicited. The Delaneys are one of fifteen families. In this section, I survey trends in the full sample of parents and adolescents.

与约翰·德莱尼一样,这项研究中的其他青少年也对越南有着丰富的记忆。每个学生都能轻易地认出照片中站在刻满名字的墙前的男人,那是华盛顿特区“越战纪念碑前的退伍老兵”。 13 看到这张照片后,许多青少年及其父母讲述了如今越战老兵的故事:他们回到美国后遭受虐待。尽管每个人对这个故事的描述各有不同——有时描绘的是一位“被唾弃”的老兵,徒劳地在路边搭便车,他的生活被嬉皮士和整个社会所摧残——但最终呈现的效果却是一样的。与美莱村大屠杀后人们将他视为远方暴行的始作俑者不同,如今的越战老兵被铭记为越南战争的受害者,而非施暴者。 14

Like John Delaney, the other teenagers in this study possessed rich narratives about Vietnam, and each student easily identified the picture of a man standing in front of a wall of chiseled names as a “vet standing before the Vietnam War memorial” in Washington, D.C.13 On viewing this picture, many of the youths and many of their parents narrated a story of today's Vietnam vet, ill-treated upon his return to American soil. While individuals limned this story in greater or lesser detail—sometimes depicting a “spat-upon” vet, hitchhiking futilely by the side of the road, his life embittered by hippies and society at large—the overall effect was the same. Not the instigator of atrocities in a far-off land, as the vet was viewed in wake of the My Lai massacre, today's Vietnam vet is remembered as a victim of, not a perpetrator in, Vietnam.14

参与者分享的图片展现了集体记忆历史记忆之间的一些差异。 15例如,不同学科的学者都研究过退伍军人返回美国时是否普遍遭受“吐口水”的现象。 16 从杰里·伦贝克的社会学研究到鲍勃·格林的新闻报道,再到加州大学圣巴巴拉分校的托马斯·比米什、哈维·莫洛奇和理查德·弗拉克斯对380篇关于“返乡”的报纸报道进行的档案研究,17 文献表明,这种集体印象除了媒体的渲染之外,几乎没有其他依据。对历史记录的考察表明,人们更容易记住退伍军人遭受其他退伍军人虐待的事件,而不是他们遭受嬉皮士暴徒的虐待。 18但在我们的访谈中,从未提及退伍军人之间的虐待事件。这类故事及其所代表的更广泛的问题,已经逐渐被人们遗忘。随着时间的推移,这些故事已被集体从大众记忆中抹去

The images shared by our participants illustrate some of the differences between collective and historical memory.15 For example, scholars across the disciplines have examined the question of whether it was common for veterans to be “spat upon” on their return to the United States.16 The literature, from Jerry Lembcke's sociology to Bob Green's journalism to archival research examining 380 newspaper reports of “homecomings” by Thomas Beamish, Harvey Molotch, and Richard Flacks at the University of California, Santa Barbara,17 suggests that this collective image has little basis other than its crystallization in the media. An examination of the historical record shows a stronger documentary basis for remembering veteran's ill-treatment at the hands of other veterans than their abuse by raging hippies.18 But stories of veteran-to-veteran abuse never made it into our interviews. Such stories, and the larger sets of issues they represent, have blurred from memory. Over time, these stories have been collectively occluded from popular memory.

集体记忆的反面是集体记忆。它指的是那些不再是常识、不再容易获取或被视为理所当然的事物。集体记忆促使我们思考那些在传播过程中被阻断的故事、图像和文化符号。这是一个代代相传的过程。那些被尘封在历史记忆中,又存在于人们日常生活中的故事,在社会记忆和传承历史的日常过程中,面临着被遗忘的风险。19

Collective occlusion is the flip side of collective memory. It speaks to that which is no longer common knowledge, no longer easily retrieved or taken for granted. Collective occlusion asks us to think about the stories, images, and cultural codes that become blocked in the transmission process from one generation to the next. Archived in historical memory and present in lived memory, occluded stories are at risk of being lost in the everyday processes of how societies remember and transmit their pasts to a new generation.19

我之所以更倾向于使用“遮蔽”而非更常用的“失忆”,原因有几点。首先,“遮蔽”传达了一种阻碍感;它并非指这些记忆被抹去或遗忘,而是指它们不再突出,不易被察觉。其次,即使记忆被遮蔽,在历史和档案文化中,它们仍然可以通过书籍、网络,以及大学的专业研讨会等途径获得。最后,“失忆”将社会记忆描绘成单一的、社会统一的过程,从而误解了其复杂性。“遮蔽”一词则带有片面性和不透明性的含义,更能真实地传达这种复杂性。

I prefer the term “occlusion” to the more widely used “amnesia” for several reasons. First, “occlusion” conveys a sense of blockage; it is not that these memories are erased or forgotten, but that they are not salient and not easily seen. Second, even when memories are occluded, they are, in historical and archival cultures, available in books, on the Web, and often in specialized university seminars. Finally, “amnesia” misrepresents the complexity of social memory by conveying monolithic, socially uniform processes. “Occlusion” with its connotations of partiality and opacity, tries to convey this complexity more authentically.

我们研究的代际层面揭示了从生活记忆到后天习得记忆的传递过程中会丢失哪些信息。例如,我们研究中所有在美国出生的父母都能迅速理解照片的背景:照片中,一位年轻人站在一群国民警卫队员伸出的枪管前,将一朵粉红色的康乃馨插进其中一支枪的枪管里(图10.1)即使父母无法确定这一事件的确切地点(1967年10月21日至23日的“五角大楼游行”,吸引了5万名抗议者),他们也能理解这一事件的背景。在华盛顿特区),他们理解了这幅画更深层的含义:一个嬉皮士,代表着和平与非暴力,在因战争引发的某种骚乱中,与警察、国民警卫队或可能是州民兵成员对峙。但父母们习以为常的这些规则,对他们的孩子来说却并非不言而喻。例如,请看以下这段对16岁的雅各布·柯夫曼的采访,他是约翰·德莱尼在启示高中时的同学:

 

The intergenerational aspect of our study illuminates what gets lost in the transmission from lived memory to learned memory. For example, all the American-born parents in our study quickly established a context for the picture of the young man standing in front of the outstretched gun barrels of a ring of National Guardsmen, placing a pink carnation in the barrel of one of the guns (Photo 10.1). Even if parents were not able to fix the exact location of this event (the “March on the Pentagon” in October 21–23, 1967, which drew 50,000 protestors to Washington, D.C.) they understood its larger meaning: a hippie, representing peace and nonviolence, confronting police, national guardsmen, or possibly members of the state militia, during some kind of civil disturbance over the war. But the codes parents took for granted were anything but self-evident to their children. Consider, for example, the following sequence in the interview with Jacob Curfman, sixteen, a classmate of John Delaneys's at Revelations High School:

 

雅各布:我当时没完全看懂我看到的是什么,但看起来——看起来好像这个人被枪指着,刺刀插在刺刀上,他好像在往刺刀上插花什么的,我看不清楚。但看起来就像是在一片丑恶之中做出的和平姿态。好像这个人只是想表达他对战争的诉求,他渴望和平。大概就是这样。

Jacob: I didn't totally understand what it was I'm looking at, but it looked like—it looked like this guy's being held at gunpoint, with the bayonets, and he's putting flowers in the bayonets or something, I can't make it out. But it looks just kind of like a gesture of peace in the midst of all the ugliness that's going on. Like this guy's just trying to make a statement about the war, that he wants peace. That's kind of what it looked like.

采访者:您认为这个人是如何走到刺刀前的?

Interviewer: Any thoughts as to how [this man] might have gotten in front of the bayonets?

雅各布:不太清楚。我不确定。除非他可能在帮助美国士兵之类的,我不知道。但他可能做了什么他们不喜欢的事,比如被俘虏之类的。

Jacob: Not really. I'm not sure. Unless he's like maybe aiding U.S. soldiers or something, I don't know. But doing something they didn't like, maybe just being held prisoner or something.

采访者:被谁囚禁了?

Interviewer: Held prisoner by whom?

雅各布:北越人什么的。

 

Jacob: The North Vietnamese or whatever.

 

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或者看看就读于精英大学预科学校的学生克劳迪娜·塞尔伯的回答:

 

Or consider the response of Claudine Serber, a student at the elite college preparatory school:

 

克劳迪娜:我说过这是一篇葬礼上的悼词。它展现了这一时期众多逝去的人们。

Claudine: I said it's a eulogy given at a funeral. And it shows the numerous people who died during this time period.

采访者:是什么让你觉得这是葬礼上的悼词?

Interviewer: What makes you think it's a eulogy at a funeral?

克劳迪娜:因为他手里拿着小花……感觉就像在致悼词。说着,你知道,“这个人遇难了”或者“他是个勇敢的人”……这是一个正式的仪式,站着的那个人看起来像是死者的亲属。他们都围在周围,像是在守护他的坟墓。你知道,他们聚集在一起,最后一次缅怀他。

 

Claudine: Because he's holding little flowers…. It just seems like he's saying the…eulogy. Saying, you know, “This person was killed or he was a brave person”…It's a formal ceremony and the person who's standing seems to be like a relative of the man who died. And they're all standing around like protecting his grave sort of. You know, they're gathering around to remember him for the last time.

 

雅各布·柯夫曼认为献花者是北越俘虏,克劳迪娜·塞尔伯则认为他是在悼念一位阵亡的美国士兵。他们的经历生动地展现了许多学生在解读这幅画中蕴含的文化信息时遇到的困难。近一半的学生(十五名学生中的七名)未能提供恰当的背景信息。与此同时,学生们显然知道“嬉皮士”是什么,知道嬉皮士抗议越南战争,甚至知道嬉皮士的形象:长发及腰,约翰列侬式眼镜、头巾、扎染T恤和和平标志。以此标准来评判,“五角大楼游行”照片中的年轻人显然不是越南文化课程经典文本和图像所定义的“嬉皮士”(见图10.2)

Jacob Curfman, who believed the flower bearer was being held captive by the North Vietnamese, and Claudine Serber, who thought that he was eulogizing a fallen American soldier, dramatize the difficulty many students had in decoding the cultural messages embedded in this picture. Nearly half (or seven out of fifteen students) failed to provide an appropriate context. At the same time, students clearly knew what a “hippie” was, knew that hippies protested against the war in Vietnam, even knew what hippies looked like: long hair to the middle of their backs, John Lennon glasses, headbands, tie-dyed tee shirts, and peace signs. Judged against this standard, the young man in the “March on the Pentagon” picture was clearly not a “hippie” as defined by the canonical texts and images of the cultural curriculum on Vietnam (see Photo 10.2).

在青少年对越南战争的描述中,也明显存在着类似的简化过程。在许多(但并非所有)学生的简略叙述中,越南战争的参与者泾渭分明:在越南作战的士兵和在国内抗议的嬉皮士。嬉皮士被视为美国社会的负面因素,并非因为他们反对战争是错误的,而是因为他们过度指责士兵。20没有参加华盛顿游行的美国人则在国内进行了无声的抗议。然而,历史却以一种奇特的方式被扭曲了。 我们都投票给了麦戈文。在这些年轻人的记忆中,越南战争是一场没有支持者的战争。21

A related process of simplification was apparent in the way adolescents set the stage of the Vietnam conflict. In the abbreviated narrative of many (but not all) students, the players in the Vietnam drama were stark and distinct: soldiers fighting in Vietnam and hippies protesting at home. Hippies constituted a negative element in American society, not because they were wrong in opposing the war but because they went overboard in blaming the soldiers.20 Americans who did not march on Washington marched in silent protest at home. In a curious twist of historical revision, we all voted McGovern. Vietnam, as remembered by these youths, was a war waged without supporters.21

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那么,当青少年面对直接挑战他们记忆的证据时,会发生什么呢?例如,1970年5月20日,10万名头戴安全帽的建筑工人挤满了曼哈顿市政厅,举行了一场支持尼克松总统的挥舞旗帜的集会,他们举着诸如“我们这些戴安全帽的人正在建设美国,而不是摧毁它:上帝保佑美国”、“这个国家并不完美,但它是地球上最好的国家”、“总统先生:作为三军统帅,我们支持您”之类的标语。22 照片10.3)十二位美国出生的父母中,有十一位,无论是否支持战争,都轻易地认出这是一场支持战争的集会。安妮塔的父亲弗雷德·刘易斯看到这张照片后的反应是:

What happens, then, when adolescents confront evidence that directly challenges their memory: a flag-waving rally in support of President Nixon, during which 100,000 hard-hat wearing construction workers jammed Manhattan's City Hall (May 20, 1970) with signs like, “WE HARD HAT MEN ARE BUILDING AMERICA, NOT DESTROYING IT: GOD BLESS AMERICA” “THIS COUNTRY ISN'T PERFECT BUT IT'S THE BEST ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH” “MR. PRESIDENT: AS COMMANDER IN-CHIEF WE SUPPORT YOU”?22 (See Photo 10.3.) Eleven of twelve American-born parents, whether supporters of the war or not, easily identified this as a pro-war rally. Fred Lewis, Anita's father, responded this way to the picture:

尽管对战争的目的感到困惑,许多男女仍然表现出了爱国主义精神……他们决定支持政府,即使他们未必完全了解原因

Many men and women did demonstrate patriotism even though there was confusion about the purpose of the war…. They were going to support the government even though they didn't necessarily know all the reasons why. I

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照片 10.3. 1970 年 5 月 20 日,曼哈顿市政厅,安全帽示威活动(© AP/Wide World Photos,经许可转载)

Photo 10.3. Hardhat demonstration, Manhattan City Hall, May 20, 1970 (© AP/Wide World Photos, reprinted with permission)

这些人被视为典型的蓝领工人……他们每天在外面挥汗如雨,他们说:“好吧,我们不是什么知识精英,但我们会支持你们。”

saw these people as the typical blue-collar workers…. The guys that are just out there sweating everyday, and they're, they're saying: “Well, we're not the intellectual elite here, but we're going to give you our support.”

对于这所私立预科学校一名学生的母亲艾伦·奥尚斯基来说,这张照片引起了截然不同的反应。

For Ellen Oshansky, the mother of one of the students at the private preparatory academy, this picture evoked a dramatically different response.

照片里的这些人都是一群混蛋——他们是沙文主义、无知、不思考的男人,被下半身驱使,一心想着权力,想通过贬低别人来获得优越感……我觉得他们大多是无知之徒,根本不了解情况。他们不会思考,也不会分析。这些人现在可能都在听拉什·林博的节目,只想听些让他们舒服的话……他们的世界里只有“我的国家,对错都一样”。

[The men in the picture] are a bunch of assholes—they're chauvinistic, ill-informed, nonthinking men guided by their penises who are into being powerful, into feeling important through putting other people down…. I find them to be mostly ill-informed and non-informed. They don't think, they don't analyze. These are people who today probably listen to Rush Limbaugh and want to hear what is going to make them comfortable…. It's “my country right or wrong.”

由于缺乏“集会”的概念,只有“抗议战争”的认知,看到这张照片的青少年并没有根据新的证据修正自己的观点。相反,这些年轻人将这幅画面生硬地套入他们对越南战争时期的既有认知中。60 %的学生将挥舞旗帜的工兵帽照片解读为反战抗议雅各布·柯夫曼表达了许多学生的困惑:

 

Lacking the concept of “rally” and possessing only that of “protest against the war” adolescents who viewed this picture did not revise their beliefs based on new evidence. Rather, these young people squeezed this visual image into their existing understanding of the Vietnam era. Sixty percent of students turned the picture of flag-waving hardhats into a protest against the war. Jacob Curfman expressed the confusion of many students:

 

雅各布:[这张照片] 感觉和其他照片有点格格不入,因为我们通常在这类照片里看到的都是抗议者,而不是挥舞旗帜的人……所以我不太确定该怎么想……还有那句标语,“我们这些戴安全帽的工人是在建设美国,而不是在摧毁它”,可能有点蔑视战争,但我想他们也是想表明他们仍在努力维持国家的运转。

Jacob: [This picture] just seems kind of out of place with the rest, because most of the people we see in pictures like this are protesting, not waving flags…. So I'm not really sure what to think…. And the sign, “We hard hat men are building America, not destroying it” like maybe kind of held the war in contempt, but they were trying to show that they were still trying to keep the country going, I guess.

采访者:你为什么说他们可能对战争感到蔑视?

Interviewer: Why do you say maybe they held the war in contempt?

雅各布:嗯,就是那个牌子我的意思是,整个标语看起来挺爱国的,但这个牌子特别吸引我的注意。上面写着,“我们在建设美国,而不是像士兵们那样摧毁它。或者像政府那样,或者别的什么。”

 

Jacob: Just, well, that sign. I mean the whole attitude of the thing looks like it might be pretty patriotic, but this one sign caught my attention. It says, you know, “We're building America not destroying it” like the soldiers were. Or the government was, or whatever.

 

在雅各布看来,标志中提到的破坏者是美国士兵或美国政府。23安德里亚·克拉克是一名公立高中学生,她的父亲在战争期间曾在海军服役,她对自己的解读更有把握。

 

For Jacob, the agents of destruction referred to in the sign are American soldiers or the American government.23 Andrea Clarke, a public high school student whose father served in the Navy during the war, was more certain about her interpretation.

 

安德烈亚:我写的是这是一场反战抗议。

Andrea: I put that this was a protest against the war.

采访者:(惊讶)反对?

Interviewer: [Surprised] Against?

安德里亚:是的,反对。看起来像是某个特定团体。这些人,看起来像是建筑工人之类的,都戴着帽子,而且这里似乎有很多不同种族的人。上面写着“我们是戴安全帽的人”,所以很明显,他们是……他们可能在做些手工活之类的。所以他们不想——显然这些人觉得战争正在摧毁他们的工作、家园,摧毁整个国家。

 

Andrea: Against, yes. It looks like it might have been a certain group. All these people, they look like they're construction people or something like that, with their hats on, and it looks like lots of different ethnicities in here. It says, “We hard hat men” so, obviously, they're doing something with their hands or something like that. So they didn't want to—obviously these people felt like the war was destroying their jobs, their homes, destroying the country as whole.

 

私立预科学校的学生格洛丽亚·劳伦斯将这幅画解读为“建筑工人罢工”。

Gloria Lawrence, a student at the private preparatory academy, interpreted the picture as a “strike by construction workers.”

他们希望士兵们回家……这些人罢工,冒着丢掉工作的风险,抗议越南的士兵,他们希望士兵们回家,因为这些士兵是他们的家人、兄弟、堂兄弟、儿子。我相信这正是当时抗议活动的一部分。

They want the soldiers to be brought home…. That these men are going on strike and risking their jobs to protest the soldiers in Vietnam, and they want them brought home, because they are their family members and their brothers, cousins, sons. I'm sure this was part of the protest that was going on.

记忆的风景

LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY

与本研究中家长们展现出的多元化观点形成鲜明对比的是,学生对越南的理解却十分狭窄。我们在三个课堂上观察到的历史教学内容丰富多样,但从青少年们几乎一致的回答中却看不出来。尽管他们代表着不同的政治、民族、种族、宗教和意识形态群体,但他们的集体反应却体现了笼罩在这些群体之上的文化课程的强大影响力和深远影响。

In contrast to the diversity of views displayed by parents in this study, student's understanding of Vietnam occupied a narrow bandwidth. The history instruction we watched in these three classrooms was quite varied, but we would not know it from the uniformity of the adolescent's responses. Despite the various political, ethnic, racial, religious, and ideological subgroups they represented, their collective responses attest to the power and sweep of the cultural curriculum that hovers above such groups.

在这项工作中,我们踏上了一段实证之旅,探索历史与记忆碰撞的世界:既包括运用我们认知大多数事物的日常意义建构能力来认识过去,也包括通过有条不紊的思维习惯来认识过去。在分析数据时,我们更关注的是人们的理解是否符合某种权威的信息体系,而不是试图构建历史记忆的地形图,即普通人如何思考过去并以此理解现在的粗略地图。目前,那些设计学校历史教材和课程的人既不承认也不认可集体记忆在教学中的重要性——事实上,它甚至不被视为最重要的力量。我认为,正是集体记忆的实质构成了我们试图在学校教给孩子们的知识框架。24

We have embarked in this work on an empirical journey into the colliding worlds of history and memory, of knowing the past using the ordinary sense-making capacities we use to know most things, and knowing it as the result of disciplined habits of mind. In analyzing our data, we are less concerned with whether people's understanding corresponds to some canonical body of information than we are with trying to generate topographies of historical memory, rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present. At present, those who design textbooks and curricula for teaching school history neither acknowledge nor recognize collective memory as a significant force—indeed, as the force—to be reckoned with in teaching and learning. But it is the substance of collective memory, I would claim, that serves as the framework for what we attempt to teach kids in school.24

罗伊·罗森茨威格和戴维·特伦(Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen 最近对一千多名美国人进行了一项电话调查,旨在了解人们如何在日常生活中利用过去。这种方法使研究人员能够大致了解与过去相关的日常活动的发生率(以及人们赋予这些活动的意义),例如追溯家族谱系或参观历史博物馆。尽管这些信息很有价值,但它无法让我们将个体的回答置于具体的语境中。它既没有涵盖家庭、学校、教会和社区,也没有提供详细的理解画像,使教育者能够深入了解学生认知世界的各个角落。

Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen25 recently undertook a telephone survey of over a thousand Americans to understand how the past is used in everyday life. Such an approach allows these researchers to generate a broad image of the incidence of everyday activities related to the past (and the meanings people attach to these activities), such as pursuing family genealogies or visiting historical museums. As valuable as such information may be, it does not allow us to locate individual responses in the context of the family, the school, the church, and the community. Nor does it provide the detailed portraits of understanding that would allow educators access to the nooks and crannies of student'ss cognitive landscapes.

本文采用的样本范围较小,因此得出的概括必然较为保守。这些概括指向的是一种正在形成的日常历史理解理论,而非对研究参与者之外的事件发生率和频率的直接陈述。尽管如此,这些背景各异、教育程度、宗教信仰和世界观不同的参与者之间存在的共性,使我们确信,我们在此样本中观察到的趋势并非个例。

The approach taken here involves a narrower sample, and the resulting generalizations are, by necessity, more modest. Such generalizations point us to an emerging theory of everyday historical understanding rather than to any direct statement of incidence and frequency beyond the participants in our study. Nonetheless, commonalties across these diverse participants, with different educational backgrounds, religious views, and ways of seeing the world, give us confidence that trends we see in this sample are more than idiosyncratic.

集体记忆起到过滤器的作用。26随着时间的流逝,历史事件的细节不仅变得模糊不清,而且过去被记住或被掩盖的内容也在不断地受到当代社会进程的重塑:国家行为纪念某些事件而忽略其他事件,小说家和电影制作人决定讲述一个故事而不是另一个故事,以及一系列模糊的社会需求,这些需求既汲取了过去的一些元素,又使另一些元素处于休眠状态。

Collective memory acts as a filter.26 Not only do the details of historical events become less vivid as time passes, but what is remembered or occluded from the past is constantly being reshaped by contemporary social processes: acts of state that commemorate certain events and not others, decisions by novelists and filmmakers to tell one story and not another, and an amorphous set of social needs that draw on some elements from the past while leaving others dormant.

事实上,正是这最后一点——当下对过去的要求——促使法国社会学家莫里斯·哈布瓦赫斯(Maurice Halbwachs)断言,集体记忆根本不关乎过去,而是完全反映了当代的社会需求和当代的社会状况。哈布瓦赫斯认为,现代性的到来和快速的社会变革在现在与过去之间造成了一道鸿沟,如同“两个树桩末端相接,却因其他方面没有连接而无法形成一棵完整的树”。 27

Indeed, it was this last aspect—the demands that the present places on the past—that led the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs to claim that collective memory was not about the past at all, but was entirely a reflection of contemporary social needs and the contemporary social condition. The onset of modernity and rapid social change, according to Halbwachs, created an abyss between the present and the past, akin to “two tree stumps that touch at their extremities but do not form one plant because they are not otherwise connected.”27

新哈布瓦赫学派的代表人物,如社会学家巴里·施瓦茨和雅埃尔·泽鲁巴维尔,则采取了一种不那么极端的立场,他们认为历史记忆与历史记录(如历史学家的著作中所呈现的)之间存在辩证关系。28与皮埃尔·诺拉一样,这些学者将注意力集中在记忆场所——战场、纪念碑、博物馆——以及与过去相关的文化材料的生产上:小说、通俗读物、电影和散文。然而,迄今为止,几乎没有人尝试追踪历史记忆的过程如何在普通人的生活中发挥作用:普通人如何体现(或未能体现)集体记忆理论家所提出的广泛的社会过程。

The neo-Halbwachians, sociologists Barry Schwartz and Yael Zerubavel, take a less extreme stance and see a dialectic between historical memory and the historical record (as represented in the work of historians).28 Like Pierre Nora, these scholars focus their attention on sites of memory—battlefields, monuments, museums—as well as on the production of cultural materials related to the past: novels, popular books, films, and essays. To date, however, there have been few if any attempts to track how the processes of historical memory play out in the lives of ordinary people: how it is that the proverbial person-on-the-street embodies (or doesn't) the broad social processes posited by the theorists of collective memory.

如果没有这种视角,我们就很容易受到詹姆斯·沃奇所指出的批评,即把文化产品的生产与……混为一谈。他们的消费。29个人既受精英阶层产品的影响,也受其影响。试图构建一种绕过个人的集体记忆概念(一种奇怪的、并非由任何特定个人持有的集体记忆)30将会陷入还原论和本质主义的泥潭。为了理解社会如何记忆,我们需要对文化的传播、适应和重塑进行宏观和微观分析。

Without this perspective, we open ourselves to the criticism noted by James Wertsch of conflating the production of cultural products with their consumption.29 Individuals are influenced by, and also act upon, the products of elites. Attempts to arrive at a conception of collective memory that bypasses the individual (a collective memory curiously held by no one in particular)30 will run aground on the banks of reductionism and essentialism. To understand how societies remember, we need both macro-and micro-analyses of cultural transmission, adaptation, and reformulation.

我们显然还处于理解数据的初期阶段。我们最终的希望是,通过阐明青少年如何理解过去,我们可以更好地与他们的历史信念互动,拓展他们的认知,并在必要时提出质疑。从这个意义上讲,我们的研究不仅仅是对文化研究的一次探索。作为一名认知科学家(其本义即认知科学家——一个跨学科领域的工作者,该领域融合了人类学、社会学和心理学,旨在理解意识现象 31 ),我同时也是一名改良主义者。鉴于这些关于青少年理解的图景,以及其他研究对其的持续支持,新的课程应该朝着哪个方向发展?我们应该如何为新历史教师设计有效的教育?基于这些及类似的研究结果,我们可以设计什么样的软件,以及提出什么样的在线问题?在设计新的教育干预措施时,我们究竟是在为谁设计?我们对教育创新“最终用户”的现有理解和信念又了解多少?

We are clearly in the earliest stages of trying to understand our data. Our hope, ultimately, is that by shedding light on how adolescents make sense of the past, we can learn how to better engage their historical beliefs, stretch them, and call them, when necessary, into question. In that sense, our investigation is more than a foray into cultural studies. As a cognitive scientist in the original sense of that term—a worker in an interdisciplinary field that draws on anthropology, sociology, and psychology in an effort to understand the phenomena of consciousness31—I am also a meliorist. Given these images of adolescent understanding, and continued support for them in other studies, what direction should new curricula take? How would we design effective education for new teachers of history? What software might we design, and what on-line questions would we ask, based on these and similar findings? In designing new educational interventions, who, exactly, are we designing them for? And what do we actually know about the existing understandings and beliefs of the “end users” of our educational innovations?

我最近向一位朋友描述了这些发现,他是一位资深的高中历史教师。他懊恼地指出,历史教师自身也严重依赖视频和其他文化课程产品,应该将它们从课堂上移除。但我认为这样做无济于事。微积分课堂或许是我们学习高等数学的地方,但我们学习历史无处不在——学校并非历史学习的垄断场所。将视频从课堂上移除,它们依然存在于家庭、DVD、有线电视和DirecTV等几乎所有地方。与其假装我们可以彻底消除流行文化——没收视频、禁止说唱音乐、给任天堂游戏机加装磁铁、拔掉MTV和电影频道的电源——我们不如尝试理解这些力量是如何塑造历史意识的,以及如何利用它们(而不是排斥它们,更糟糕的是,直接忽略它们)来增进学生的历史理解。

I recently described these findings to a friend, a longtime veteran of the high school history classroom. Chagrined, he pointed out that history teachers themselves depend heavily on videos and other products of the cultural curriculum, and should remove them from the classroom. But this, I believe, won't help. The calculus classroom may be the site where we learn advanced mathematics, but we learn history everywhere—school hardly possesses a monopoly. Removing videos from the classroom leaves them intact in the home, on the DVD, on cable and DirecTV, and practically everywhere else. Rather than pretending that we can do away with popular culture—confiscate videos, banish rap music, magnetize Nintendo games, and unplug MTV and the Movie Channel—we might try instead to understand how these forces shape historical consciousness, and how they might be used, rather than spurned or, worse, simply ignored, to advance student's historical understanding.

笔记

NOTES

本章专为本书而作。部分章节曾以略微修改的形式发表于彼得·N·斯特恩斯、彼得·塞克斯和萨姆·温伯格主编的《认识、教授和学习历史:国家与国际视角》(纽约,2000年)。此外,我曾在1999年9月于德国汉诺威举行的“传统传承”研讨会上发表过本章的早期版本。感谢哈拉尔德·韦尔泽教授的邀请和鼓励。同时,我也感谢本项目的合作者苏珊·莫斯伯格和丹·波拉特,与他们共同发展和完善了本文的思路。最后,我与里德·史蒂文斯就此进行的持续交流也令我受益匪浅。

 

This chapter was written especially for this volume. Sections have appeared, in slightly altered forms, in Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York, 2000). I also presented an early version of this chapter at a working conference on “Transmission of Tradition” held in Hanover, Germany, in September 1999. I thank Professor Harald Welzer for inviting me and for his encouragement of this work. I also thank my collaborators in this project, Susan Mosborg and Dan Porat, with whom the ideas here were developed and refined. Finally, I have benefited much from on-going conversations with Reed Stevens about this work.

 

1.这些采访由我本人、Alex Shih、Diana Hess 和 Susan Mosborg 进行。

1. These interviews were conducted by myself, Alex Shih, Diana Hess, and Susan Mosborg.

2.我借鉴了彼得·塞克萨对这项任务的阐述。参见他的《绘制历史意义的疆域》,载社会教育》 61(1997),22-27。

2. I drew on Peter Seixa's formulation of this task. See his “Mapping the Terrain of Historical Significance” Social Education 61 (1997), 22–27.

3.我们的研究任务和访谈内容包括:让学生阅读日报(了解他们如何将过去与现在联系起来),让他们讲述美国历史上争取民权的斗争,以及让他们向我们解释老师在学期论文上所写评语的含义

3. Our research tasks and interviews ranged from an interview in which students read the daily newspaper (to see how they connected past and present) to an interview asking them to narrate the struggle for Civil Rights in American history to another interview in which they explained to us what they thought their teachers meant by comments written on their term papers.

4.我们还请家长完成一份包含30道选择题的历史事实测试。通过比较家长和孩子在同一测试中的得分,我们可以得出结果。保守派声称的“代际记忆衰退”相反,我们发现家长和学生的得分之间没有统计学上的显著差异,学生的得分略高一些。

4. We also asked parents to complete a 30-item multiple-choice test on historical facts. Parent's responses allowed us to compare their scores with those earned by their children on the same test. Contrary to conservative's claims of an “erosion of memory” across generations, we found no statistically significant difference between the parent's and student's scores, with a slight advantage going to the students.

5.照片启发法是由人类学家玛格丽特·米德和格雷戈里·贝特森开发的一种技术。有关其近期应用的概述,请参见道格拉斯·哈珀的《论图像的权威:视觉方法的十字路口》,载于诺曼·K·丹津和伊冯娜·S·林肯主编的《定性研究手册》 (加利福尼亚州千橡市,1994 年),第 403-412 页。

5. Photo elicitation is a technique developed by the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. For an overview of more recent uses, see Douglas Harper, “On the Authority of the Image: Visual Methods at the Crossroads” in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1994), 403–12.

6.然而,这只是部分情况,因为这所学校的宗教课也教授历史。在我们以阅读每日新闻为主题的访谈中,我们请学生们回顾最近密西西比州一起关于学校祈祷的法庭案件。来自“启示录”学校的五名学生中有四名,各自独立地引用了托马斯·杰斐逊写给丹伯里浸信会的信——这是宗教课上教授的一份原始文献。参见苏珊·莫斯伯格的《评估历史意义》手稿(华盛顿大学,2000年)。

6. This, however, is only a partial picture, for history was also taught in religion classes at this school. In our interview focusing on reading the daily news, we asked students to review a recent Mississippi court case about prayer in school. Four of five students from Revelations, independently of one another, drew on Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, a primary source document taught in religion class. See Susan Mosborg, “Assessing Historical Significance” manuscript (University of Washington, 2000).

7.参见 Jerry Lembcke,《吐口水的形象:神话、记忆和越南的遗产》纽约,1998 年)。

7. See Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1998).

8. Eric Dean,《地狱般的震颤:创伤后应激障碍、越南战争和内战》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1997 年)。Dean的资料来源是《西雅图的喜悦;部队撤出越南》,《时代周刊》 (1969 年 7 月 18 日),第 5 页。

8. Eric Dean, Shook Over Hell: Post-traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). Dean's source is “Joy in Seattle; Troops Withdrawn from Viet Nam” Time (July 18, 1969), 5.

9. 《阿甘正传》在青少年对越南战争时期的重建中发挥了重要作用,其影响超过了任何其他单一来源——包括父母、老师或教科书。青少年们自发讨论的其他电影包括《第一滴血》、《年少轻狂》、《野战排》《现代启示录》。三所学校都提到了《阿甘正传》;它是唯一一部将两代人联系起来的“文本”(无论是视觉上的还是其他方面的)。在60%关于越南的访谈中都提到了这部电影。其他任何文本都无法与之相提并论。

9. Forrest Gump played a major role in adolescent's reconstructions of the Vietnam era, more than any other single source—including parents, teachers, or textbooks. Other movies spontaneously discussed by adolescents included Rambo, Dazed and Confused, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now. References to Forrest Gump were made across all three schools; it was the only “text” visual or otherwise, that united both generations. The movie was mentioned in 60 percent of the interviews on Vietnam. No other text even came close.

10.例如,参见威廉·亚当斯(William Adams)的《战争故事:电影、记忆与越南战争》(“War Stories: Movies, Memory, and the Vietnam War”),载于比较社会研究》(Comparative Social Research )第11卷(1989年),第165-183页。相关文献浩如烟海。综述可参见基思·比蒂(Keith Beattie)的《伤痕的纽带:美国文化与越南战争》(The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War)(纽约,1998年);琳达·迪特玛(Linda Dittmar)和吉恩·米肖(Gene Michaud )的《从河内到好莱坞:美国电影中的越南战争》(From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film)(新泽西州新不伦瑞克,1990年);以及约翰·赫尔曼(John Hellmann )的《美国神话与越南的遗产》(American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam)(纽约,1986年)。

10. See, for example, William Adams, “War Stories: Movies, Memory, and the Vietnam War” Comparative Social Research 11 (1989), 165–83. The literature is voluminous. For overviews see Keith Beattie, The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York, 1998); Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990); and John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York, 1986).

11. Colleen M. Seifert、Robert B. Abelson 和 Gail McKoon,“主题知识结构的作用”,载于 John A. Galambos、Robert B. Abelson 和 John B. Black 编,《知识结构》(新泽西州希尔斯代尔,1986 年)。

11. Colleen M. Seifert, Robert B. Abelson, and Gail McKoon, “The Role of Thematic Knowledge Structures” in John A. Galambos, Robert B. Abelson, and John B. Black, eds., Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, N.J., 1986).

12 .皮埃尔·诺拉,“历史与记忆之间:Les Lieux de Memoire” Representations 26 (1989),1-15。

12. Pierre Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire” Representations 26 (1989), 1–15.

13.在我们向青少年展示的六张图片中,越战纪念碑的图片无疑是最容易辨认的,这印证了诺拉的观点:后世记住的并非事件本身,而是我们如何纪念过去。每年有超过一百五十万人前来瞻仰越战纪念碑,留下超过两万五千件纪念品。在十五个家庭中,有九个家庭的家长、孩子或双方都曾前往纪念碑朝圣。关于此类朝圣活动的最新研究,请参阅克里斯汀·安·哈斯所著的《被带到纪念碑前》(伯克利,1998)。

13. The picture of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was by far the most identifiable of the six we presented to adolescents, exemplifying Nora's point that it is how we commemorate past events, not the events themselves, that is remembered by future generations. Over a million and a half people file by the Vietnam memorial each year, leaving over 25,000 mementos. In nine of the fifteen families, a parent, a child, or both have made a pilgrimage to the wall. For a recent study of such pilgrimages, see Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall (Berkeley, 1998).

14.纽伦堡审判的主审律师特尔福德·泰勒在其1970年出版的《纽伦堡与越南:一场美国悲剧》(芝加哥)一书中发出这样的控诉我们把越南这个国家摧毁得支离破碎,甚至懒得清理血迹和瓦砾……不知何故,我们未能吸取我们在纽伦堡承诺要传授的教训,而这种失败正是今天美国的悲剧”(第207页)。根据H·布鲁斯·富兰克林的说法,我们自我认知从加害者转变为受害者的过程始于战争后期“那些村民惨遭屠杀、儿童被凝固汽油弹袭击、越南战俘遭受酷刑和谋杀、受伤的美国大兵痛苦哀嚎、以及一袋袋尸体被装上运回国的真实照片和电视画面,都被模拟的美国战俘落入亚洲共产党野蛮手中的画面所取代”(《失踪人员,或美国的造梦》(布鲁克林,1992),第54页)。弗雷德·特纳在《战斗的回响:美国记忆中的越南战争》 (纽约,1996)第11页问道:“那么,为什么在短短二十年间,美国士兵作为刽子手的形象就消失了,取而代之的是美国士兵作为受害者的形象?为什么现在这么多美国人仍然像过去那样执着于美国大兵作为冷血杀手的观念,执着于老兵作为幸存者的形象?”

14. Telford Taylor, the presiding attorney at the Nuremberg trials, issued this indictment in his 1970 book, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (Chicago): “We have smashed the country [of Vietnam] to bits and will not even take the trouble to clean up the blood and rubble…. Somehow we failed ourselves to learn the lessons we undertook to teach at Nuremberg, and that failure is today's American tragedy” (p. 207). The act of transforming our self-image from perpetrator to victim began during the latter part of the war, according to H. Bruce Franklin. “The actual photographs and TV footage of massacred villagers, napalmed children, Vietnamese prisoners being tortured and murdered, wounded GIs screaming in agony, and body bags being loaded by the dozen for shipment back home were being replaced by simulated images of American POWs in the savage hands of Asian communists “(M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America [Brooklyn, 1992], 54)”. Asks Fred Turner, in Echoes of Combat: the Vietnam War in American Memory (New York, 1996), 11, “How is it then, that in twenty years, the image of the American soldier as executioner should have vanished and that of the American soldier as victim should have taken its place? Why do so many Americans cling as tenaciously now to the image of the veteran-as-survivor as they once did to the notion of the GI-as-stone-cold-killer?”

15.我意识到与“集体化”记忆相关的概念性问题,这种行为通常被视为个体过程。正如阿莫斯·芬肯斯坦在《集体记忆与历史意识》(载《历史与记忆》1 (1989), 5–26)一文中所指出的正如一个民族无法哀悼或庆祝一样,严格来说,它也无法真正地记忆。另一方面,至少自黑格尔以来,人们就已意识到,社会进程始终与个体记忆行为息息相关。

15. I recognize the conceptual problems related to “collectivizing” memory, an act that is often regarded as an individual process. As Amos Funkenstein noted in “Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness” History and Memory 1 (1989), 5–26, just as a nation cannot mourn or celebrate, it cannot, properly speaking, remember. On the other hand, at least since Hegel, there has been an awareness that social processes are always implicated in acts of individual remembering.

在心理学家中,维果茨基对这一观点的阐述最为清晰。关于这些问题的概述,请参阅帕特里克·H·赫顿的《历史作为记忆的行为》(新罕布什尔州汉诺威,1993年),以及大卫·戈登在《历史与理论》 34(1995年),340-54页上对赫顿著作的精辟评论。

Among psychologists, Vygotsky articulated this view most clearly. For an overview of these issues, see Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Act of Memory (Hanover, N.H., 1993), as well as the insightful review of Hutton by David Gordon in History and Theory 34 (1995), 340–54.

16.与我们听到的众多关于越南老兵遭受虐待的故事形成鲜明对比的是,在我们的访谈中,很少有人提及国内对越南战争的支持。然而,1966 年哈里斯民意调查显示,73% 的美国人表示他们“深切关注”这场战争,61% 的人表示他们“亲自参与其中”。参见 Turner,《战斗的回响》,第 127 页。

16. In contrast to the multiple stories we heard of ill-treatment of Vietnam veterans, domestic support for the Vietnam War was rarely mentioned in our interviews. However, a Harris poll in 1966 noted that 73 percent of Americans said they were “deeply concerned” about the war, and 61 percent said that they were “personally involved.” See Turner, Echoes of Combat, 127.

17. Lembcke,《Spitting Image》; Bob Green,《Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned from Vietnam》纽约,1989 年);Thomas D. Beamish、Harvey Molotch 和 Richard Flacks,“谁支持军队?”社会问题42 (1995),344–60。

17. Lembcke, Spitting Image; Bob Green, Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned from Vietnam (New York, 1989); Thomas D. Beamish, Harvey Molotch, and Richard Flacks, “Who Supports the Troops?” Social Problems 42 (1995), 344–60.

18.特别参见 David E. Bonior、Steven M. Champlin 和 Timothy S. Kolly合著《越南老兵:被忽视的历史》(纽约,1984 年),第 99-118 页。Bonior和他的同事指出,直到 20 世纪 80 年代,一些老牌退伍军人团体仍然反对将新的联邦资金用于越南老兵项目,例如吉米·卡特在 1977 年提出的旨在提升战争期间不公正地授予的不光彩退伍等级的计划。博尼奥尔及其同事写道:“对于大型组织而言,问题远不止资金问题,它根植于情感层面。总统的计划触及了他们对这些陌生、新奇、有时留着长发的退伍军人的所有矛盾心理,这些人中有些甚至丢弃了勋章,似乎对一切都漠不关心。那些没有获得荣誉退伍的越战老兵被视为失败者,他们在遥远的越南输掉了这场‘小战争’。不知何故,他们对越战老兵的态度改变了他们长期以来对退伍制度的担忧”(第108页)。作者指出,到1977年,没有一个主要的退伍军人组织选举越战老兵担任其最高职位,直到1981年,海外战争退伍军人协会的所有高级职员中也没有一位越战老兵。

18. See in particular David E. Bonior, Steven M. Champlin, and Timothy S. Kolly, The Vietnam Veteran: A History of Neglect (New York, 1984), 99–118. Bonior and his colleagues note that well into the 1980s, established veterans groups opposed spending new federal dollars on programs for Vietnam veterans, such as the one proposed by Jimmy Carter in 1977 to upgrade dishonorable discharges that had been unfairly meted out during the war. Bonior and colleagues write: “The problem for major organizations ran deeper than money. It had emotional roots. The president's program had captured all of their ambivalence about these strange, new, sometimes long-haired veterans, some of whom had thrown their medals away and seemed to hold nothing sacred. Vietnam veterans with less than Honorable Discharges were the loser veterans who had lost the ‘little war’ in distant Vietnam. Somehow, their attitude toward Vietnam veterans led to a change in their long history of concern over the discharge system” (p. 108). The authors note that by 1977 not one of the major veteran's organizations had elected a Vietnam veteran to its top post, and as late as 1981 the Veterans of Foreign Wars did not have a single Vietnam veteran in any of its senior staff positions.

19.关于相关论点,参见保罗·康纳顿的《社会如何记忆》英国剑桥,1989年)。康纳顿关于记忆的身体化呈现的论点颇具启发性,但我认为在信息日益丰富、技术日益精湛的全球化社会中,这一论点已经过时。

19. See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, England, 1989), for a related argument. Connerton's thesis about the bodily enactment of memory is provocative but I find it outdated in an increasingly information-rich, technologically sophisticated global society.

20.想想十七岁的路易斯·法拉(Luis Fara)——一所公立高中的学生——的话:“嬉皮士让那些回来的士兵日子过得很艰难……这些人不支持士兵。毕竟,士兵们并非主宰,他们只是在执行任务,我认为嬉皮士让士兵们在战后很难应对他们所经历的一切……我认为反对战争是可以的,但我认为不应该把部分责任归咎于真正的士兵,因为他们在这个问题上并没有真正的话语权。”

20. Consider the words of seventeen-year-old Luis Fara, a student at the public high school: “Hippies [were] the type of people who made it real difficult for the soldiers who came back…these kinds of people were the ones that didn't support the soldiers. Because after all, [the soldiers] weren't the ones that were in charge, they were just doing their job, and I think [hippies] made it really difficult for the soldiers really afterwards even to cope with what they had to go through…. I think it's alright to be against a war, but I don't think it's right to blame actual soldiers for some of that, because they don't have a real big say in the issue.”

21.将这种记忆与当时的民意调查进行比较,即使是在战争后期也是如此。例如,在理查德·尼克松下令在海防港布雷并将战争扩大到柬埔寨和老挝之后,《时代》杂志委托丹尼尔·扬克洛维奇公司对从2000名美国人中随机抽取的200名美国人进行了深入访谈。“十分之七的人表示对总统的战争指挥重拾信心。只有十分之三的人表示……”对他投不信任票”“时代公民小组:总统为战争争取更多时间——以及一些希望”《时代周刊》 (1972年6月12日),第16-17页。 《时代》周刊的调查中,几个主题尤为突出首先,对尼克松的支持分散在民主党人和共和党人中,而且两党都有选民强烈认为需要升级战争(请记住,当时是1972年6月!)。“打赢这场战争,赶紧结束它,”印第安纳州劳伦斯堡的家庭主妇、共和党人威尔玛·“比莉”·伦纳夫人说道。“我们在海外和国内都受到欺凌。我对那些不支持尼克松总统的人感到厌恶。”还有这样的例子:“马里兰州都柏林的高中辅导员沃尔特·格兰普在州初选中投票给了埃德蒙·马斯基,他认为,如果总统的顾问们认为采矿风险过高,他们就会投票反对。” “我相信,”他说,“北越现在会谨慎行事,不会采取任何升级行动。”其他几个主题也值得注意:在北越港口布雷“风险虽大,但值得”;布雷行动与轰炸行动不同,而且事实证明更为有效;支持者的态度是鹰派的“我们不会被吓倒”。回想一下,乔治·麦戈文的竞选纲领是立即从越南撤军并赦免逃避兵役者,结果却以美国总统选举史上最大的惨败告终。麦戈文曾说过“如果美国人自己不是罪犯,那么至少他们支持一个由罪犯组成的政府”,这显然不是当时美国人对自己的看法,而且,从我们样本中受访家庭的回答来看,也不是他们现在对自己的看法。参见西奥多·怀特,《总统的诞生,1972》(纽约,1973年),第116页。

21. Compare this memory to surveys of attitudes taken at the time, even during the latter years of the war. For example, after Richard Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong harbor and escalated the war by extending it into Cambodia and Laos, Time commissioned Daniel Yankelovich Inc. to engage a group of 200 Americans, from a cross-sample of 2,000, in extensive interviews. “Seven out of ten express a renewed confidence in the President's conduct of the war. Only three of ten give him a vote of no confidence” “Time Citizens Panel: The President Buys More Time—and Some Hope—on the War” Time (June 12, 1972), 16–17. Several themes stand out in the Time survey. First, support for Nixon was spread across Democrats and Republicans, and there were voters from both parties who strongly felt that the war needed to be escalated (recall that the date was June 1972!). “Fight it and get it over with” says Mrs. Wilma (“Billie”) Renner, a Lawrenceburg, Ind., housewife and a Republican. “We're being pushed around overseas and at home. I'm disgusted with people not backing President Nixon.” Or this: “Walter Glamp, a Dublin, Md., high school counselor who voted for Edmund Muskie in his state's primary, feels that the President's advisers would have voted against the mining if they thought it was unduly risky. ‘I believe,’ he says, 'that the North Vietnamese now will watch their step before taking any escalatory actions of their own.” Several other themes were noteworthy: that the mining of North Vietnamese harbors was “risky but worth it”; that the mining of harbors differed from the bombing campaign and would prove to be more effective; and that the attitude of supporters was a hawkish “we won't be bullied.” Recall that George McGovern, who ran on a platform of immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and amnesty for draft dodgers, was defeated in the biggest landslide in American presidential history. McGovern's statement “If Americans themselves were not criminals then at least they supported a government run by criminals” was clearly not how Americans saw themselves then, or, judging by the responses of families in our sample, how they see themselves now. See Theodore White, The Making of a President, 1972 (New York, 1973), 116.

22.这次集会是在武装部队日举行的。集会上的其他标语(在提供给家长和学生的照片中看不到)写着“停止左翼电视”和“弹劾红色市长”,指的是纽约市长约翰·V·赛,他是战争的反对者。参见R· 弗里德,《俄国人来了!俄国人来了!》(纽约,1998年)。

22. This rally was held on Armed Forces Day. Other signs at the rally (not visible in the photo presented to parents and students) read “Stop Leftwing TV” and “Impeach the Red Mayor” a reference to New York's John V. Lindsay, an opponent of the war. See R. M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (New York, 1998).

23.在这些访谈中,甚至连一些公开持保守立场的父母也表达了类似的观点:美国政府才是越南战争的罪魁祸首,而非士兵,甚至也不是在国内支持他们的民众。就此而言,这些访谈展现了美国人对美国政府罪责的不同看法,与迈克尔·G·卡门(Michael G. Kammen)的描述截然不同。参见卡门的著作《记忆的神秘和弦:美国文化中传统的转型》(纽约,1991年),第657页,他在书中声称,在当前的越南战争神话中,“美国政府不再是毁灭性的力量”。而本研究中接受采访的普通民众显然对此持不同意见。

23. The idea that the American government was the agent of destruction in Vietnam, not soldiers or even the citizens who supported them domestically, was a theme that echoed in these interviews, even by parents with avowedly conservative positions. In this respect, these interviews provide a different sense of how Americans view the culpability of the American government than the one depicted by Michael G. Kammen. See his Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 657, in which he claims that the “U.S. government disappears as a devastating force” in the current mythology of Vietnam. The ordinary people interviewed in this study clearly disagree.

24.在加州大学洛杉矶分校国家历史教育中心(1995年)出版的《美国历史国家标准》中,很难找到任何对当代文化如何塑造现代历史意识的严肃探讨。这些标准的制定者缺乏实证数据,他们很大程度上是抱着一种幻想,认为通过改变教科书就能改变历史的教学和理解方式。约翰·威尔斯的一项关于课堂教学的民族志研究表明,即使在使用关于美洲原住民的新教材,且教师明确支持新方法的课堂上,文化编码的、根植于主流文化文本中的信仰最终也战胜了新的教科书叙事。参见约翰·威尔斯,《大众文化》,课程与历史表征:美国历史中美洲原住民的处境和刻板印象的延续”叙事与生活史杂志4 (1994),277–94。

24. One would be hard-pressed to find in the National Standards for United States History, published by the National Center for History in the Schools, University of California (Los Angeles, 1995), any serious examination of how contemporary culture shapes modern historical consciousness. Framers of the standards, unburdened by empirical data, operated largely on the fantasy that by changing textbooks they could change how history is taught and understood. An ethnographic study of classroom instruction by John Wills showed that even in a classroom that used new materials on Native Americans, and in which the teacher clearly supported the new approach, culturally encoded beliefs, enshrined in the texts of the larger culture, ultimately triumphed over new textbook narratives. See John Wills, “Popular Culture, Curriculum, and Historical Representation: The Situation of Native Americans in American History and the Perpetuation of Stereotypes” Journal of Narrative and Life History 4 (1994), 277–94.

25. Roy Rosenzweig 和 David Thelen,《过去的存在》纽约,1998 年)。

25. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past (New York, 1998).

26.参见诺拉, 《历史与记忆之间》1-15。

26. See Nora, “Between History and Memory” 1–15.

27. Halbwachs 的这段引文出自 Barry Schwartz 的文章“亚伯拉罕·林肯的重建”,载于 David Middleton 和 Derek Edwards 编辑的《集体记忆(伦敦,1991 年),第 104 页。

27. The source of this citation from Halbwachs is Barry Schwartz, “The Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln” in David Middleton and Derek Edwards, eds., Collective Remembering (London, 1991), 104.

28.参见 Schwartz 的《重建》和 Yael Zerubavel 的《新的开始,旧的过去:以色列文化中开拓精神的集体记忆》,载于 Laurence J. Silberstein编的《以色列历史的新视角:建国初期》(纽约,1990 年)。

28. See Schwartz, “The Reconstruction” and Yael Zerubavel, “New Beginning, Old Past: The Collective Memory of Pioneering in Israeli Culture” in Laurence J. Silberstein, ed., New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State (New York, 1990).

29.参见 James V. Wertsch,“我们能否同时教授知识和信仰?”,载于 Peter N. Stearns、Peter Seixas 和 Sam Wineburg 编,《认识、教授和学习历史:国家和国际视角》(纽约,2000 年)

29. See James V. Wertsch, “Can We Teach Knowledge and Belief at the Same Time?” in Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York, 2000).

30.有关这一点,请参阅 James Fentress 和 Chris Wickham 的社会记忆》(马萨诸塞州剑桥,1992 年)。

30. For a related point see James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

31.关于认知科学的当前潮流与其早期跨学科根源之间的区别,请参阅杰罗姆·布鲁纳的《意义的行为》马萨诸塞州剑桥,1990 年)。

31. On the difference between current fashions in cognitive science and its earlier interdisciplinary roots, see Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).